»All true natural science is philosophy and all true philosophy is natural science,« Haeckel stated, thereby naming the ambitious philosophical and clear scientific claim that runs through his entire work. The logic of nature, which he understood as a coherent system whose forms emerge from evolution and kinship, was his preferred field of experimentation. In his introductory essay »Ernst Haeckel: Art Forms of Life,« zoologist and author Rainer Willmann describes Haeckel as a central figure of the 19th century who took up Darwin’s ideas, popularized them, and translated them into his own visually shaped worldview. His plates were meant to make connections comprehensible and visible and to trigger that »incredulous amazement at the beauty of natural objects« that Willmann describes as their lasting effect.

Born in Potsdam in 1834, Haeckel studied medicine and natural sciences, though it can be credibly claimed that his ambition hardly lay in a medical career. He scheduled his office hours from five to six in the morning, thus keeping the rest of the day free for zoological studies. A journey to Italy proved formative for him, where in 1859 he studied radiolarians in the Gulf of Messina. He drew the tiny single-celled organisms with their geometrically structured skeletons, as he wrote to his fiancée Anna Sethe, with »mathematical fidelity.« Already in these works, that connection of precision, systematics, and compositional sensibility emerged that would define his later plate works.

The 688-page volume guides readers through 450 reproductions from Haeckel’s monographs on said radiolarians, siphonophores, calcareous sponges, corals, medusae, and deep-sea organisms up to the Art Forms in Nature published between 1899 and 1904. The reproductions show his precise capture and deliberate ordering of structures. Symmetries are emphasized, bodies isolated, color values clarified, individual forms assembled into ornamental groups. Scientific illustration and artistic composition can hardly be separated. This keeps the images effective to this day, even where his research has been superseded.

In her essay »Ernst Haeckel and the Evolution of Modern Art,« Julia Voss traces the remarkable career of these motifs. Haeckel’s marine creatures, as she writes, left the book pages and found their way onto European facades, squares, stage curtains, and paintings. His forms were taken up by artists and designers such as René Binet, Émile Gallé, Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch, Max Ernst, and Wassily Kandinsky—an unusually wide reach for scientific representations. On the internet, according to Voss, they ultimately went »viral.«

The proximity to Hilma af Klint (1862—1944) that Voss elaborates also gives Haeckel’s work an indirect contemporary relevance. The Swedish contemporary of Haeckel and pioneer of abstract painting remained largely unrecognized during her lifetime and is today celebrated as a groundbreaking artist of early abstraction. Currently, the Grand Palais in Paris is showing Hilma af Klint. Paintings for the Temple (1906—1915) , the first major solo exhibition of the Swedish artist in France. Voss brings both together through their shared interest in development, cell division, and the mutability of organic forms. While Haeckel understood the living as the result of a long evolutionary process, af Klint directed her gaze toward the futuristic potential of transformation and toward forms that might yet emerge.

In her 1907 painting »Group IV, No. 9. The Ten Largest, Old Age,« a large-format tempera work on paper mounted on canvas, a sequence of growth, division, and transformation unfolds against a flesh-colored ground. Cell-like structures develop into two rotating figures. The proximity to Haeckel’s embryos and organic basic forms, according to Voss, lies less in direct appropriation than in a shared thinking in development, transformation, and inner laws.

As an object, too, the volume continues this idea of system. The binding of the hardcover with slipcase appears like a natural history plate: organisms float on a light ground, strange and precise. Inside, large-format image plates, historical photographs, manuscript pages, and essays alternate. Its physical presence corresponds to the ambition not to reduce the diversity of life to a famous motif.

Yet serious contradictions also belong to Haeckel’s story. Accordingly, the view of him as a scientist and interpretive thinker remains critical. Willmann names his scientific errors, his racist hierarchizations, and his later nationalist statements as facts and without embellishment. The brilliant observer was countered by a thinker with considerable blind spots. This recognition does not diminish the formal power of his work, but it does prevent purely aesthetic veneration.

The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel shows a researcher who sought to understand nature through drawing and in doing so created images that extended far beyond biology and scientific illustration. Their visual radiance remains palpable to this day. The comprehensive publication from TASCHEN opens an archive of seeing, filled with beauty, knowledge, error, and afterlife [Ed.]

The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel
Hardcover in slipcase, 24.3 x 30.4 cm, 688 pages
taschen.com

The recent work of Los Angeles–based photographer Eloise Hess revolves around memory, perception, and the fragility of holding on. Personal and intimate, it asks what an image can reveal when memory begins to falter—and how photography, between intention and chance, forms its own kind of truth.

Chapter In your series Second Hand (2024) and Early Morning Tomorrow (2025), you worked together with your father Charles Hess. What motivated you to explore that collaboration?

Eloise Hess My father has Early-Onset Alzheimer’s. We’re seven years since his diagnosis and longer since the onset of his symptoms. Early in the disease he carried this insistent yearning to photograph everything. This centered the question of photography—why? As the disease progressed, he struggled to use the camera. He pointed the camera in the wrong direction, against his intention. When the photograph misses the photographer’s intention, why then? The act superseded the outcome. We found ways to take photographs together, adapting the process as his abilities changed. In what became Second Hand, I wound the film and helped him find the button on the camera, he pointed the camera and pressed the button. Sometimes he framed the picture with his hands, as if holding the camera, and I shot the picture he held. Then he could no longer find or press the button, nor hold the imagined camera in his hands. In what became Early Morning Tomorrow, he held and pointed the camera in the direction he wanted to photograph, or in a direction unintended, and I shot the picture through his viewfinder. These are not necessarily the photographs he would have taken on his own, nor the photographs he intended to take. They’re as determined by my aim as by the discomfort I felt in our two-person act. Our collaboration began when it felt called for, and ended when it was clear it should. In a wider sense it continues.

»2.27«, 2025 | Early Morning Tomorrow

»4.27«, 2025 | Early Morning Tomorrow

»19.27«, 2025 | Early Morning Tomorrow

Chapter In this context, how has the experience of creating this work shaped the way you think about memory and impermanence—themes often associated with age and reflection?

Eloise Hess The experience of this disease, alongside making this work, has taught me an enormous amount about the function of memory and the actuality of impermanence. As I’ve seen, when memory fails, the sense of self begins to unravel. This can be wildly painful, and also profound. Memory helps us organize our experience as our experience exceeds our capacity to contain it. It helps us to stabilize the through-line that constitutes our sense of self. Photography can be used as a tool in this construction; it often is. We often take photographs to remember our experiences—and we often remember best the ones that have been photographed. But a photograph is a cut, a limited kind of intake, a limited kind of output, cut from the whole. It can be used to close down memory, to align it with expectation—or to open up memory, to imbue it with speculation. It is a cut of the actual—made more permanent than the moment it records and the moments that surround it, yet just as partial as the moment it records and as permeable to the impressions upon it. I’m interested in a photography that reckons with this position between persistence and instability, index and impressionability.

»21.27«, 2025 | Early Morning Tomorrow

»23.27«, 2025 | Early Morning Tomorrow

Chapter More generally, what place does vulnerability hold in your artistic practice?

Eloise Hess I’m hesitant to use the word vulnerability, which comes from the word wound. I’m concerned with receptivity. Receptivity includes vulnerability, at times. To maintain receptivity means to churn through and make form of whatever comes through, however it comes. There is what compels me to make and what compels me while making, a passive and active attunement. When I feel compelled to make, it’s difficult not to try to resurrect just what compelled me to make initially, but while making, to be compelled again, differently than initially, to maintain responsiveness throughout.

»Sky Clad«, 2025 | Picture a Train

»Ledges«, 2025 | Picture a Train

Chapter You describe your work as being about the act rather than the outcome, emerging from gestures rather than observations. From your perspective, what does the process of making reveal that you can’t access through the finished image?

Eloise Hess I may have been speaking, as I said earlier, of the act of photographing superseding the outcome of the photograph. That was a lesson in that collaboration. But I don’t mean to pose the act against the outcome, or the making against the finished work. The finished work holds the entire process of making it; the act is inseparable from the outcome. The process of making reveals lots of »not it« that you can’t access through the finished work because they’re not in it. The »not its« include the photographs I don’t print, the prints I don’t choose. I make dozens more prints per painting than are included in the finished painting, and sometimes scrape off and re-make the same painting on the same panel many times over. All the »not its« help me find what it is. I spend much more time with the work in process than with the finished work. But a lot happens with the finished work beyond my making it. There is the process of the viewer, maybe many, whose experience I cannot know but which meets mine somewhere with the object.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN CHAPTER №XIII »IDENTITY« — WINTER 2025/26

The tapestry, conceived as a practical object to warm floors, structure rooms, or insulate walls, has for centuries transcended its seemingly everyday purpose, assuming a second existence as a work of art. Within it, craftsmanship, visual language, and cultural memory condense into a compositional unity that extends far beyond its utilitarian function.
In the work of Jean Lurçat, the most influential textile artist of the 20th century, the tapestry likewise exceeds its original role: at once material and metaphor, surface and narrative space—a textile image poised between utility and aesthetic significance. In this dual role—as both handcrafted object and medium of symbolic imagination—lies the foundation upon which Lurçat built his radical renewal of tapestry.

Born in Bruyères in 1892 and deceased in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1966, Jean Lurçat was active during his lifetime as a painter, ceramist, and tapestry weaver, among other things. Before dedicating himself entirely to art, he actually studied medicine at the Université de Nancy. However, after barely three years, he transferred to Victor Prouvé’s studio, also in Nancy, and subsequently continued his artistic education at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. From 1919 onwards, Lurçat increasingly emerged as an independent artist and began to establish himself as a painter and graphic artist in the French art scene.
Influenced by the decorative practices of the École de Nancy and his teacher Victor Prouvé, father of Jean Prouvé and a leading figure of this collective art movement, Lurçat came into early contact with the central principle of Art Nouveau, that art and craft are inextricably linked. However, his inclination towards the textile medium did not arise solely from this environment but was also—as many biographies emphasize—shaped by a personal experience: in 1917, his mother embroidered a small Gobelin tapestry based on one of his designs.

While works such as »Filles Vertes« (»Green Girls«, 1917) and »Soirée dans Grenade« (»Evening in Granada«, 1917), and later »Le Cirque« (»The Circus«, approx. 1922) and »Les Arbres« (»The Trees«, approx. 1924), demonstrate that he designed small-format, sometimes decorative tapestries early on and continuously created experimental textile works in parallel with his painting, which were executed in weaving and embroidery workshops, it was not until the 1930s that he primarily dedicated himself to tapestry weaving.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Lurçat initially worked primarily as a painter, maintained a lively social life, and moved in circles of important personalities of his time, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, and Ferruccio Busoni. In the early 1920s, he met the French gallerist, collector, and art patron Marie Cuttoli, through whose initiative and support several small-format tapestries were already created based on his designs. Driven by the idea of dissolving the boundaries between fine and applied arts, Cuttoli presented innovative textile works alongside fine art in her gallery Myrbor in Paris. In line with her ambition to transfer modern art into textiles, she commissioned contemporary artists, including Picasso, Braque, Le Corbusier, and Léger, with designs that were subsequently realized as tapestries. As part of this project, in 1933, a tapestry based on a Lurçat design was produced for the first time in Aubusson, the traditional center of French tapestry weaving—the tapestry titled »L’Orage« (»The Storm«, 1933).
The execution of the work was still based on classical, painterly cartoons and without the new structure he later developed, but it marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with the traditional workshops in Aubusson—a collaboration that became the decisive prerequisite for the precise implementation of his conceptual and technical innovations in the following years.

IMMANENT SPARK

A first milestone on his now unstoppable path to becoming a central representative of modern tapestry art was his first major commission, »Illusions d’Icare« (»The Illusions of Icarus«, 1936), in 1936. The large-format work was commissioned by the French state and subsequently woven at the Manufacture des Gobelins, which has served as a state manufactory for the execution of tapestries for public buildings, museums, and state collections since the 17th century.
However, the decisive change of course in his work, which ultimately led to the revival and redefinition of tapestry as an independent, contemporary art form, was his encounter with the »Apocalypse of Angers« at the Château d’Angers in 1937, a 14th-century tapestry described on the official museum website of the Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine as »déterminante« for his later textile work.
While tapestry had, for centuries since the Renaissance and Baroque, become a woven painting—characterized by designs in the form of illusionistic, painterly executed cartoons and nuanced color transitions—the textile clarity of the Middle Ages had largely been forgotten. With its clear contours, reduced colors, and great symbolic directness, Lurçat recognized in the medieval »Apocalypse of Angers« that tapestry does not have to be a painterly imitation, but can be an independent medium with a visual language developed from weaving techniques.

From this realization, that tapestry possesses its true strength in a visual language developed from weaving techniques, Lurçat derived his conceptual and technical reorientation: the radical reduction of the color palette, a numbered color code, and the abandonment of painterly designs in favor of strictly structured black-and-white cartoons, which gave clear instructions to the executing weavers and at the same time allowed him more control over the result. Thus, for the first time, tapestries were created that were no longer designed from the logic of painting, but again from their textile logic. Lurçat’s newly understood, profound view of textile material is described by Martine Mathias in the catalog for the exhibition Jean Lurçat — Master of French Modernism (Kunsthalle Talstraße, Halle/Saale, 2016) with the statement that it is above all the »intelligence of matter« that makes it possible to understand the quality of Lurçat’s tapestry weaving.

His artistic attitude, shaped by this idea of intelligent matter—a kind of energetic signature expressed in structures, rhythms, and forms—is based on the recognition and respect for the inherent life of the material, which he does not bypass but consciously reveals. This perspective, as Mathias notes, is rooted in his comprehensive humanistic education and his familiarity with ancient writings such as those of the Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius, whose De rerum natura (»On the Nature of Things«, 1st century BC) describes matter as a living reality permeated by inner forces. Mathias underscores this assumption with a quote that aptly summarizes Lurçat’s attitude: »Anyone who tries to subjugate the spirit of matter in wall tapestries behaves like a child.«
Following the inner logic of textiles, the tapestry thus becomes not merely a carrier of an image, but an organic medium in which this hidden energy becomes visible. For Lurçat, the threads form a poetic fabric in which the »spiritual« dimension of the world materializes. Already in the 1940s, works such as »La Grande Menace« (»The Great Threat«, 1940) and the eight-part, most symbolically dense group of works from the war years, »Constellations« (»Constellations«, approx. 1940-1945), make matter visually tangible as an energetic field, combining natural forms, signs, and rhythms into a metaphysical pictorial world.

DISSOLUTION OF THE WORLD

With the outbreak of the Second World War, global reality entered a phase of devastating political, social, and cultural upheavals, accompanied by the decomposition of all morality. Jean Lurçat, who had experienced the First World War as a soldier and survived it severely wounded, developed a lifelong sensitivity to the destructive forces of war. In the Second World War, in the Lot department—a region in southwestern France strongly influenced by the Resistance, where many intellectuals found refuge—he joined the circle of Resistance-affiliated artists such as Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet, Jean Cassou, and Pierre Seghers, who opposed the Vichy regime and the occupation.
His tapestries from these years—such as »Les Vapeurs« (»The Vapors«, 1943), »Les Eaux« (»The Waters«, 1943), or »De natura solari rerum« (»On the Solar Nature of Things«, 1943), and later also »Liberté« (»Freedom«, 1945), »Avec la France dans les Bras« (»With France in its Arms«, 1945) and »La Naissance du Lansquenet« (»The Birth of the Landsknecht«, 1944)—process these experiences as moral-cosmic statements: powerful, often subversive depictions that accuse war, oppression, and collaboration, while also formulating a vision of human dignity, spiritual freedom, and renewal. In these works, man usually appears as a vulnerable but conscious being, embedded in a web of natural forces, cosmic signs, and political threat—a fragile figure exposed to the violence of war and yet remaining a bearer of human dignity and inner freedom.

As Martine Mathias emphasizes in the exhibition catalog Jean Lurçat — Master of French Modernism (Kunsthalle Talstraße, Halle/Saale, 2016), this depiction fundamentally shifts during this period, which shaped him both personally and artistically: the human figure gradually recedes until it completely disappears in many of his later works. Its place is taken by cosmic rhythms, plants, animals, stars, fire, and light—symbols of a broader world structure that increasingly interested Lurçat. This slow disappearance of the explicit human form from his works does not indicate indifference, but a shift in perspective. Man becomes a small part of a larger, energetic context, in which nature and cosmos themselves become the actual visual language.

A POETIC UNIVERSE

In Lurçat’s work, a development now becomes increasingly clear, culminating in an ethereal dimension. His modern interpretation of the aether—that fifth element quinta essentia postulated by Aristotle, whose physical reality has long been disproven, but whose poetic power endures—understands it as an immanent spark connecting nature, man, and cosmos.
A symbolic language used in this sense, Mathias writes, appears from the mid-1950s onwards, for example, in the use of zodiac signs, which he integrated into his visual world as a metaphorical principle. Stars and constellations appear not as astronomical facts, but as signs of a deeper connection, as luminous nodes of a living structure useful for practical guidance and emotional orientation for humanity. As an example, she describes the ninth scene, »Poésie« (»Poetry«, 1961), from his monumental cycle »Chant du Monde« (»Song of the World«, 1957—1966), in which Lurçat depicts an archer, accompanied by the retinue of zodiac signs and a sun symbol with a human face—an ancient but still fruitful poetic method of shaping space and time through celestial signs.
In the first eight tapestries of the cycle, the cycle unfolds a narrative movement ranging from the primordial forces of the world to its threats: »Le Feu« (»The Fire«, 1957), »L’Eau« (»The Water«, 1958), »Les Arbres« (»The Trees«, 1958), and »Les Grands Champs« (»The Great Fields«, 1959) form the prelude to an elemental natural order, while »La Grande Menace« (»The Great Threat«, design 1940 / revised version 1959), »Les Illusions d’Icare« (»The Illusions of Icarus«, 1960), »La Conquête l’Espace« (»The Conquest of Space«, 1961), and »La Fin de Tout« (»The End of Everything«, 1962) illustrate the tensions, dangers, and upheavals of this world.

Lurçat calls the cycle, as Mathias notes, »table des matières d’une existence« (table of contents of an existence), and this, according to her, connects to his explicit will to »intellectually grasp the world and human destiny.« Created over a tireless creative period spanning almost a decade and woven in the traditional workshops of Aubusson, »Chant du Monde« is considered his magnum opus and comprises ten monumental tapestries with a total area of approximately 500 square meters, which are now preserved in the Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine in Angers. His monumental masterpiece tells a modern, cosmic creation story in which the cosmos appears as a living organism permeated by inner forces—a universe of stars, plants, animals, radiations, and energy fields that, despite being threatened by war and destruction, still understands humanity as part of a larger, luminous order.
The tenth scene, »Ornamentos Sagrados« (»Sacred Ornaments«, 1966), was completed after his death, and what remains is the epochal (life’s) work of an exceptional artist, in which Jean Lurçat’s inner worldview, his tireless creative spirit, and his identity as an artist and human being of his time are not merely laid over the fabric, but inscribed into the intelligence of the fiber of his matter.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN CHAPTER №XIII »IDENTITY« — WINTER 2025/26

Jungjin Lee‘s photographs seem to exist in a space between matter and spirit, where landscape becomes a mirror of inner perception. The South Korean artist transforms personal moments in nature into universally resonant meditations on time and silence. In conversation with Chapter, she reflects on the balance between control and surrender—and how harmony emerges between the self and the natural world.

Chapter  Your images seem to blur presence and absence—what does the idea of identity mean to you in the context of your work?

Jungjin Lee  When inspiration arises in the landscape, it is a moment when my spiritual presence aligns with the subject. This experience goes beyond thought and is difficult to explain in words. I see the act of visualizing the energy inherent in nature as a way to express not only my identity, but the universal truths of human emotion. The Taoist idea of selflessness—letting go of the ego and becoming one with nature—is a fundamental concept I pursue throughout my process. While my images may appear ambiguous, the emotions they convey are clear. During photographing and printing, I focus entirely on my own feelings, yet I do not consider the work as a direct reflection of my personal identity. Instead, my photographs carry the »breath« of human existence, which I see as the power of art. I have observed that viewers often encounter their own inner emotions through the work rather than mine.

Everglades #11, 2014-15

Chapter  Many of your images seem to hold time still, yet they are deeply infused with change—weather, erosion, light. How do you think about time not only as a subject, but as a collaborator in your process?

Jungjin Lee  Weather and light are always essential elements in landscape photography. In my work, light itself often becomes the source of inspiration, almost as if the image is drawn by it. The sense of time in my photographs leans more toward duration than fleeting moments. Although the images may appear frozen, they are not static; they suggest a timeless state—a presence that unfolds as the viewer engages with the work. I see this as an energy beyond time and space, subtle yet palpable. When I photograph, it is crucial for me to empty my thoughts and surrender to the subject and to nature. Rather than imposing myself, I attempt to read what is already present. It is not a collaboration with nature in the conventional sense, but an acknowledgment that I can express only as deeply as I am able to receive what nature reveals.

Opening #13, 2015-16

Chapter  Your compositions are oftentimes pared down to essentials—silence, texture, tone—yet they feel emotionally vast. What emotional space do you hope the viewer inhabits when encountering your work?

Jungjin Lee  The printing process in my studio is as important to me as the act of photographing itself. Through printing on hanji, I work to amplify simplicity and abstraction, attending carefully to the texture of the paper and the depth of tonal expression. The philosophy of yeobaek—the presence of space—emerges naturally both in photographing and in printing. »Emptiness« is not »nothing«, but an infinite expanse of another dimension. I hope my work is experienced not merely with the eyes, but with the mind. It is my intention to convey the quiet awareness I feel before the subject. In this way, viewers often encounter their own inner state rather than the narrative of the artist. I describe this as the condition of human existence, a quality revealed only in works that have reached their fullest realization.

Opening #01, 2015-16

Chapter What personal source of inspiration has remained almost inexhaustible for you as an artist over the years?

Jungjin Lee It is solitude and nature. Solitude has allowed me to live as an artist, while nature embraces that absolute solitude. In nature, I realize that the solitude I have known is not merely a personal feeling, but the essence of human inner being. In the moments when I am absorbed in photographing, that solitude transforms into a sense of fullness through the presence of the subject. I feel as though I become part of nature—those are my happiest moments. In this sense, the camera becomes a profound instrument that mirrors my inner being in the objects and scenes I encounter.

Everglades #01, 2014-15

FIRST PUBLISHED IN CHAPTER №XIII »IDENTITY« — WINTER 2025/26

The first analytical entry point is provided by Uli Sigg’s essay »An Outsized Appetite for Risk«. The Swiss collector and long-time observer of the Chinese art scene describes Ai Weiwei as an artist who consciously takes risks—both aesthetically and politically. Sigg traces how, from his early years in New York’s East Village to his internationally renowned installations, Ai Weiwei developed a practice in which art is understood as a social situation. Projects such as »Fairytale« at Documenta 12, for which 1,001 people from China were invited to Kassel, demonstrate how Ai Weiwei turns encounters between people, cultures, and political realities into the very material of his art.

The book is supported by insightful essayistic approaches and a chronological chapter structure that traces Ai Weiwei’s development over several decades: from the years 1983–1993 in New York to his return to Beijing (1993–1999) and the political and artistic projects of the 2000s. These stages mark biographical phases as well as the increasing intertwining of art, public debate, and political reality in Ai Weiwei’s work.

This historical contextualization is followed by Roger M. Buergel’s essay »The Mediator’s Ways«, which interprets Ai Weiwei’s practice from an art-historical perspective. Buergel describes the artist as a mediator between cultural systems, historical materials, and political contexts. One example is the installation »Template«, shown at Documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007. The structure, built from historical door and window frames, partially collapsed during a storm—an event Ai Weiwei did not view as a failure, but accepted as part of the work. For Buergel, this reveals a central principle of Ai Weiwei’s practice: art remains an open process that includes chance, time, and social dynamics.

The later chapters of the volume follow Ai Weiwei’s work through the politically charged years after 2008—from his investigation into the victims of the Sichuan earthquake to his detention in 2011 and the international exhibitions and film projects that followed. At this point, Alfred Weidinger’s essay »Against the Walls—Ai Weiwei and the Right to Visibility« comes into focus, concentrating primarily on works from the 2010s onward. Weidinger shows how, after his imprisonment, Ai Weiwei developed a new phase in his practice in which questions of visibility, control, and the public sphere became central. Projects such as »@Large« on Alcatraz, installations like »Law of the Journey«, or the large-scale intervention »Good Fences Make Good Neighbors« in New York demonstrate how Ai Weiwei translates global issues such as migration, surveillance, and political freedom into spatial and visual structures.

Weidinger particularly emphasizes how Ai Weiwei integrates new media and digital platforms into his artistic practice. Photography, film, and social media become instruments through which political reality is documented and simultaneously reflected upon artistically. Works such as the film »Human Flow« or image series from refugee camps show how closely personal observation, documentary practice, and political intervention are intertwined.

What emerges is a publication from the house of TASCHEN, oversized not only in its physical form but also in its scope and intellectual depth. Moving beyond the framework of a conventionally closed monograph, it presents itself as a complex portrait of an artist while leaving space for a future in which his work continues to evolve—biographically, art-historically, and politically. A book that, with foresight, makes Ai Weiwei’s positions visible: art as a medium through which individual experience, historical memory, and global conflicts come into view. [Ed.]

Ai Weiwei. Updated Edition
25 x 33.4 cm, 4.03 kg, 736 pages
taschen.com

]]> https://chapter.digital/en/art-innenkreis-new-design-gallery-in-copenhagen/ Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:44:40 +0000 https://chapter.digital/innenkreis/ On 19 March 2026, Innenkreis opens in Copenhagen as a new gallery that deliberately places contemporary functional works in dialogue with historical positions of the decorative arts created before 1940. The inaugural exhibition, »Raiments,« presents the work of Danish designer Lærke Ryom, whose practice is defined by a material-driven, craft-based approach to furniture. With this concept, founder Zeynep Rekkali Jensen connects contemporary design positions with historical references, establishing a curatorial framework that understands functional objects as part of an ongoing cultural dialogue. In conversation with Chapter, she discusses the idea behind the gallery, her curatorial perspective, and broader questions of how design and craft can be communicated today.

Chapter  What led you to the curatorial idea of placing contemporary functional works in dialogue specifically with pre-1940 decorative arts?

Zeynep Rekkali Jensen  For me, integrating historical works felt more honest. In real life, our homes are never purely contemporary or purely historical. So curating a strictly contemporary environment felt slightly artificial to me, almost like pretending objects exist outside the flow of time.
The choice of pre-1940 decorative arts was deliberate. These objects reflect a moment before industrial standardization dominated design and before ornament was vilified by modernism. Decorative elements, especially figurative ones, were still natural and coveted. I love that. I want to see Goddess Artemis with her crescent crown on objects around me. For me, objects that allow us to feel something, not only to use them efficiently, are vital.

Additionally, the world already has exceptional mid-century and late 20th-century design specialists, so I did not feel drawn to that canon. Instead, my aim was to contribute more poetry.
When I choose the historical pieces, I prioritize those that clarify and reinforce the exhibition’s conceptual theme, connect the narrative, or introduce a timeless, visionary design perspective.
For example, the armchair by Anton Pospischil was exhibited at the MAK in Vienna in 1902. I like to remember that our work now is not entirely new. Designers in the past also worked at the edge of their time, with skill, vision, and patience. It is humbling and inspiring.

Chapter  Would you say the placement of contemporary works alongside historical pieces such as Josef Hoffmann’s nesting tables or a Gio Ponti lamp shapes the way viewers engage with the objects—and encourages the slower looking that craft-based work requires? And more broadly, how do you approach cultural mediation in a time of shrinking attention spans and a culture increasingly experienced through screens?

Zeynep Rekkali Jensen  I don’t think of it as fighting against shrinking attention spans, but rather creating the conditions for attention to return. The gallery space is intentionally calm, and I’m very invested in the meeting point between craft and conceptual thinking.
Craft-based objects retain a quality that cannot be digitized: their weight, texture, and presence. The conceptual narrative of the exhibition, the craft processes, and the dialogue with historical pieces all mediate the work for the viewer.
The historical objects serve as anchors in the room, establishing continuity amid a culture that moves rapidly from one image or trend to the next. Their presence, shaped by time, shifts the atmosphere and slows the experience, emphasizing a connection between past and present.

Chapter  Why did you choose Lærke Ryom’s exhibition Raiments as the opening show for Innenkreis? What made her practice the right starting point for the gallery?

Zeynep Rekkali Jensen  Textiles can appear gentle at first glance, but the decisions behind them are extremely technical. That tension, softness that is actually structural, feels very much like the spirit of Innenkreis.
What I admire about Lærke is that she is both an impeccable designer and a deeply committed craftsperson. When you sit in her pieces, you immediately feel how carefully they are designed. They are incredibly comfortable, which places them within that Scandinavian tradition of thoughtful, human-centered design.
She pushes that tradition further. In this exhibition, every piece is hand-stitched. This creates a completely different rhythm of making.

Chapter  Ryom speaks of »dressing« furniture rather than upholstering it, allowing materials to drape naturally rather than forcing them into rigid forms. Would you say this approach reflects a more co-creative relationship between material, craft, and function in contemporary design culture?

Zeynep Rekkali Jensen  Yes, absolutely. Lærke references philosopher Michel Serres’s notion of hospitality as mutual transformation. To host is to accept change. In her work, the furniture frame becomes a host. It offers structure and support while letting go of control. What emerges through that negotiation is an object formed through care rather than command, where softness is an ethical refusal of control. This refusal challenges the hierarchies inherited from functionalist modernism, in which structure was privileged as truth and softness was pushed aside as decoration. [Ed.]

In his first monograph, »I Thought That I Would Be in Heaven But I Am Only Up a Tree«, photographer Ryan James Caruthers explores the landscape as a queer space of experience—one in which personal identity dissolves and unfolds within the boundless possibilities of nature. Through his work, Caruthers creates a poetically melancholic visual world that coalesces into an emotionally resonant body of work.

Chapter You’ve described nature as a place of refuge during your childhood—a space where queerness could exist without constraint. How did you approach translating that felt sense of freedom into the language of photography, where identity in your images seems to dissolve into landscape?

Ryan James Caruthers When I first started making these images, I wasn’t sure of the exact path or the reasoning, it was more a sense of exploration, going out into the landscape to create without the idea of what exactly I was looking to find—if anything. It probably wasn’t until halfway into my project that it started to click. I realized that the work was resonating at a level that felt almost intrinsic, as if the images were part of me. I think a lot of the reasoning comes after, but the deep hues and painterly quality of the images likely come from my memory of how I encountered these places as a child, or how I felt this grand sense of awe—these encapsulated scenes of verdancy.

Chapter In his essay for the book, writer and poet Ocean Vuong suggests that your work transforms the landscape into a space of boyish mysticism and queer possibility. His words seem to move through your images as much as your images move through his language. What did you recognize in his writing that felt deeply connected to your own way of seeing?

Ryan James Caruthers Ocean is, without doubt, one of the greats. The theme of otherness is woven through much of his work, and it’s something that deeply resonated with me—and, of course, is connected to the nature of the project. I think being queer, being an outsider—this is how most of us felt growing up, that we were looking for a sense of serenity or safety in a world that maybe didn’t yet understand us. I am grateful that he was able to articulate my images into words; his understanding is so deep and profound.

Chapter You’ve spoken of Caspar David Friedrich’s »The Monk by the Sea« as an influence—a figure surrendering to something vast and unknowable. What does surrender mean to you—personally and/or as an artist?

Ryan James Caruthers »The Monk by the Sea« wasn’t an immediate reference from the beginning, but it crept up on me sometime throughout the project. I had seen the painting in a book years before, and it must have been living somewhere in my consciousness. There is surrender in allowing yourself to be completely vulnerable and to create at a level that is deeply connected to your roots and consciousness. I’m not too sure if there is separation between the art and the person—to me, they’re quite interlinked. The surrender is what makes us human.

Chapter What do you find yourself returning to when you need to feel inspired?

Ryan James Caruthers There are a few: I’m an avid collector of books—photography, art, interiors—which provide constant inspiration. Listening to others talk about their own paths and the way they move through the world. I always go back to Nina Simone’s rendition of »Wild Is the Wind«—her words, her pauses, the sweeping sound of the piano. It all feels so resonant—the mourning, the longing, the act of crying out to someone or something that is no longer there but still holds so much space in you. Nothing can beat it.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN CHAPTER №XIII »IDENTITY« — WINTER 2025/26

Since its opening in 2001, the Leopold Museum has played a pivotal role in bringing the forward-looking, experimental spirit of Vienna’s turn of the century to life—not as a singular, archived moment consigned to the past, but as an enduring cultural point of reference. Founded by the Austrian art collector, ophthalmologist, and patron Rudolf Leopold (1925–2010), the museum remains consistently devoted to the art and culture of around 1900. With its extensive collection—including major works by Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Oskar Kokoschka—it has established itself as one of the leading institutions dedicated to the presentation of Viennese Modernism.

By continually reimagining its permanent exhibition, »Vienna 1900—Birth of Modernism,« the museum repeatedly succeeds in framing the aesthetic, social, and design impulses of the era within a contemporary context, offering ever-new perspectives. On display are masterpieces from the Leopold Museum’s collection alongside significant national and international long-term loans, through which the radical energy of the past resonates and the emergence of modernity around 1900 appears remarkably relevant today.

Armchair for the Purkersdorf Sanatorium by Koloman Moser;
Executed by: Prag-Rudniker, workshop: Jakob Soulek (carpenter), 1903

How this formative turning point found expression is explored in the exhibition catalogue, which characterizes the heterogeneous milieu of the Danube metropolis as a »central engine of a turbulent movement of renewal«—one that created fertile ground for an extraordinary concentration of cultural achievement. Names such as Klimt, Freud, and Loos have long stood, requiring little explanation, as synonymous with groundbreaking innovations across a wide spectrum of modern disciplines. Vienna’s multilayered identity, shaped by movements such as the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, continues to inform contemporary debates on craftsmanship, materiality, and the role of art in society.

The world-famous group portrait of the artists participating in the 14th Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, including Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann and Carl Moll, photographed by Moriz Nähr, 1902

»Ver Sacrum. Theseus and Minotaur.« — poster by Gustav Klimt for the 1st Art Exhibition of the Association of Austrian Artists, Secession. Condition before censorship, 1898

The applied arts played a central role in realizing the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk—a term denoting the aspiration to infuse all areas of life with art, which in the age of social media might most closely correspond to the overused word »curate«. The distinction, however, lies in the ambition to create an aesthetically and conceptually self-contained whole, one that transcends dull replicability and fleeting immediacy—the logic of the »copy-and-paste-taste«.

In this context, the attentive and discerning eye will have noticed that the »Hoffmann Chair«—a label commonly applied regardless of the specific model—has, in many a carefully curated feed, been reduced to a conspicuously deployed prop, intended to signal stylistic confidence, mask mediocrity, and assert distinction »from the rest«. Yet it is worth noting, positively, that furniture from the turn of the century continues to strike a chord today, capable of evoking the atmosphere of that vibrant era—which is precisely where the exhibition’s true strength resides.

»Vienna 1900—Birth of Modernism« lays bare the foundations from which many of today’s trends and debates first emerged. Rather than concentrating on singular iconic figures, the presentation opens up a perspective on the complexity of an era in transition, whose energy continues to resonate to this day.

In keeping with this understanding of modernity as an enduring impulse that extends beyond Vienna, the Leopold Museum is also presenting a comprehensive retrospective, »GUSTAVE COURBET—Realist and Rebel« (19.02.2026—21.06.2026). With Courbet, the focus shifts to an artist who—much like the protagonists of Vienna’s turn of the century—challenged conventions and insisted upon artistic autonomy. The exhibition thus consistently aligns with the museum’s programmatic aim of revealing moments of upheaval in art history as living, ongoing impulses. [Ed.]

Vienna 1900. Birth of Modernism
560 pages 23.5 x 28 cm
1000 illustrations
leopoldmuseum.org

Architecture by Herzog & de Meuron

The architecture of »Calder Gardens« was designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, known for its context-sensitive cultural buildings. The renowned architectural practice keeps the design restrained, framing the art in a calm, carefully structured setting. Partially embedded in the ground, the structure develops along the property in horizontal sequences.

The architecture remains deliberately low and opens up to the landscape, rather than separating itself from it. In response to the kinetic and static quality of Calder’s sculptures, a sequence of spatial situations emerges, characterized by differently proportioned rooms, varying ceiling heights, and strategically placed daylight openings. Materials and surfaces are subtly chosen, directing focus to the form, movement, and scale of the sometimes larger-than-life sculptures.

Landscape Design by Piet Oudolf

Piet Oudolf, one of the most influential landscape designers of our time, was entrusted with the design of the landscape for »Calder Gardens«. His concept is based on a multi-layered planting of perennials, grasses, and woody plants, used as compositional elements that change with the rhythm of the seasons. Movement—one of the central principles of Alexander Calder’s mobiles—is created here by wind, light, growth, and change.

Oudolf’s overall overview of the planting concept for the «Calder Gardens» site, with color coding for plant selection as a reference; the drawing shows various planting concepts for the different areas of the landscape and their connection to each other.

Like Calder’s sculptures, which remain in a constant, never identical state due to air movement, gravity, and balance, the landscape is also designed as a dynamic system. More than 250 plant species form a living structure in which processes of becoming, passing, and renewal become visible. Calder’s statement »The universe is real, but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it.« can be read in this context as a unifying idea: perception is active and only unfolds in the interplay of space, time, and imagination.

Calder in his Roxbury studio, 1941.

In the garden spaces, designed as open structures, the sculptures do not appear as isolated objects, but as integral components of a changing environment. Wind, light, and vegetation continuously influence their perception and echo Calder’s interest in movement and change; Oudolf expands the environment with his intervention—as in a successful collaboration—to an additional dimension.

A Quiet System

»Calder Gardens« largely foregoes explanatory texts or traditional mediation formats, focusing instead on direct experience. The project positions itself neither as a sculpture park nor as an exhibition house, but as a coherent ensemble of space, design, landscape, and art, where Calder’s work is rethought both spatially and conceptually. In doing so, »Calder Gardens« sets a new standard for dealing with modern sculpture in public and semi-public spaces. Architecture and landscape do not compete with the art, but form an environment specifically tailored to the work—a place where design has a structural impact and allows art to speak in its own way. [Ed.]

Gschwandtner’s practice moves between object, space, and body. He understands furniture as functional everyday objects, as carriers of social, cultural, and symbolic meanings. In this sense, he describes his work as an examination of the social dimension of objects and their proximity to the human body. On the website of Radio Athènes, he formulates this approach as follows:

»Furniture is a necessity of human life but beyond its functionality, furniture design also reflects the social life of objects and has symbolic capacities.«

Trained in traditional leather processing and Spatial Design, Gschwandtner now lives and works in Vienna. His work results from both craftsmanship and art and design historical references. Materials such as canvas, leather, metal, and historical textiles, including fragments of 18th-century tapestries, fringes, and horsehair, form the basis of his formal language. Canvas, in particular, functions in his work as a flexible medium that is folded, cut, or laid out on the floor, while at the same time carrying aesthetic, historical, and narrative levels.

In the recently shown exhibition, Gschwandtner drew on Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium. The idea of the once spherical people, who were separated by Zeus and have since been searching for their other half, served as a conceptual frame of reference for questions of duality, complementarity, and relationship. New works such as museum benches, lamps, display cases, his Pillow Chairs, and textile objects, as well as their prototypes, were related to each other in a home-like structure. Gschwandtner describes this approach as an attempt to give his works the opportunity to find a counterpart—between first draft and final object, between personal use and public presentation.

In a statement, he explains how the theme of the exhibition took shape:

»Aristophanes’ idea of the spherical people, who, after being cut apart by Zeus, spend their lives searching for their other half—has followed me for a while. Somehow, it felt natural to apply this theory to many situations; there always seem to be two sides, two components, in my work: sometimes a historical one, sometimes a bodiless observation—and especially between the first attempt at a piece and its final version.

So I began thinking about giving my pieces the chance to find their other half, in Athens. Living in Vienna with the first iterations of each work helped me understand their domestic relevance more. After the final versions had been shown outside my personal space, the originals started to form an emotional dialogue with me, almost a kind of companionship. They became new protagonists in my life and my rooms.

One chair, for example, became my nightstand out of necessity. It held my water glass and books and, most importantly, greeted me every morning.

One light was never meant to be shown elsewhere; I made it for my partner’s birthday. Strangely, various versions of it found their way into exhibitions and collectors’ homes.

The gathered pieces will occupy a Greek apartment; each room will host a couple, two reunited halves—almost as if I were giving them privacy in each room to discuss their time apart. Their own symposium, or even speed dating: I let them converse with their opposite to see if it’s a match. Otherwise, we rotate.

Strange to think that I would be Zeus in this scenario. And what would my Mount Olympus be? Austrian hills? My apartment on the fourth floor?

And at the opening I turn into a speed dating moderator?

Returning to Aristophanes and his companions discussing Eros and love, it’s interesting to consider the actual social and domestic setting of the Symposium. While each guest presents their thesis on love, they are also sharing a space—drinking, eating, listening to one another.

This brings me to imagine Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, and Alcibiades inhabiting the apartment—the exhibition space—and leaving behind glasses, fragments, and traces of an evening of conversation.

Laid on the floor of Radio Athènes at Tositsa: canvases, originally from my 30th birthday party in my Vienna atelier—my own kind of symposium.«

—Lukas Gschwandtner, Vienna, November 2025

Gschwandtner’s work shows how closely function, social attribution, and emotional attachment are interwoven and interact. In the context of Radio Athènes, an independent platform for contemporary visual culture at the interface of art, design, and theory that has existed since 2014, this examination recently found a concise spatial implementation. [Ed.]

Curator Marlies Wirth (MAK – Design Collection), together with Lilli Hollein (General Director of the MAK), has developed an exhibition concept that breaks open the category of »fashion« and instead understands Lang’s work as a processual design of identity, strategy, and visual language. The title »Séance de Travail«—»working session«—is not only a historical reference to Lang’s own show formats of the 1990s, but also a programmatic statement: a laboratory in which production, advertising, brand development, spatial design, and audience experience are conceived as interconnected fields of design.

A central element of the exhibition is the MAK Helmut Lang Archive, which Lang donated to the museum in 2011 and which is today regarded as the largest and only public archive of its kind worldwide. It comprises more than 10,000 records, including not only selected garments but also prototypes, lookbooks, advertising campaigns, photographs, Polaroids, production samples, backstage materials, and internal documents. This breadth makes visible how Lang understood fashion not as an isolated product, but as an interdisciplinary design process in which cut, material, communication, space, and brand were always part of a coherent system.

In keeping with this approach, the exhibition deliberately forgoes a chronologically ordered retrospective. Instead, the material is organized according to thematic fields that render Lang’s working method legible as a constructive, analytical, and experimental practice. Particular emphasis is placed on mixed-media installations and site-specific presentations: sculptural displays, reconstructions of shop architectures, and visualization surfaces create a spatial experience that makes Helmut Lang’s overarching conception of design—ranging from fashion collections and retail architecture to brand communication—tangible.

Helmut Lang (*1956 in Vienna), who worked internationally from 1986 and became one of the most important representatives of minimalist, analytical design in the late 1990s, withdrew from the fashion industry in 2005 to devote himself entirely to the visual arts. This shift is also considered within the exhibition: Lang’s current artistic practice, which draws on the thinking of his earlier work, presents him as a designer who understands and continues to shape form, material, and identity across disciplinary boundaries.

His collections are based on reduction, functional clarity, and a conscious engagement with material and the body, with clothing always understood as part of a broader design context. All of this also informs the presentation at the MAK, where fashion appears as an applied design practice between design, communication, and cultural analysis, underscoring the enduring relevance of Lang’s work.

»Helmut Lang. Séance de Travail 1986–2005 / Excerpts from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive« makes visible how a designer continuously redefines his own categories of design and how his working method continues to resonate in fashion, communication, and art to this day: fashion is not reduced to form and surface, but understood as a cultural asset. [Ed.]

What makes the experience of art contemporary today? Rosa Park, founder of the Francis Gallery in Bath and Los Angeles, has a clear answer to this: Art needs proximity, atmosphere, and context. She explains why the space is always part of the work for her—and why she has turned her own home in Los Angeles into a stage for her new exhibition concept »Casa Francis«.

Chapter How did you come to adopt a holistic, more approachable concept for the gallery experience—one that considers not only the art but also the overall setting and mood—and why?

Rosa Park I’ve always held the belief that you cannot separate anything from its environment; there’s an inextricable link between the artwork and what surrounds it. At Francis, we’re constantly striving to create a warm, easeful setting that complements the viewing experience. Art has a tendency to feel impenetrable to those on the ›outside‹. To move away from that paradigm, we’ve pursued a softer, more domesticated interior space to build a bridge between the works we show and our audience—which includes specialists and generalists alike.

Casa Francis, Los Angeles; Group exhibition: «Have you eaten today?», 2025
Ash Roberts, «Mujō», 2025

Chapter In a time when so much visual material goes uncommented, why is it important to you to present works with greater context?

Rosa Park Without context, art exists in a vacuum—and that’s paradoxical. Art is inherently created in response to its culture and a moment in time. It is an expression of the artist, yes, but also in dialogue with what the artist is immersed in. Thus, art and context are co-dependent, and it is paramount to the gallery to show works with as wide-reaching a context as possible.

Francis Gallery, Los Angeles

Chapter Your latest project, Casa Francis, is located in your former family home in Los Angeles. Can you talk a little bit about the concept and what inspired this intentional choice?

Rosa Park The first iteration of Casa Francis had to take place in my former family home, because the concept is based on how I live with art and my objects. It had to be that personal, because the intimacy of how we curated came from that source.

Francis Gallery, Bath: Grace Watts, «Evolution Impression», 2024; «A Note, Beauty & Love», 2023

Chapter What are your thoughts on living with art?

Rosa Park In a world where almost everything serves a function or utility, I take joy in living with pieces that exist solely on their cultural and aesthetic merit. The art on my walls says more about me than any other piece at home. When I hang the first painting or position the first sculpture, that’s when my house becomes a home.

ARTICLE FIRST PUBLISHED IN CHAPTER №XII »SIMPLICITY« — SUMMER 2025

Lucie Rie (1902–1995) is considered one of the most influential ceramic artists of the 20th century. Yet her work continues to defy simple categorization. She cared neither for artistic labels nor for theoretical explanations—her focus was always on the act of making, on direct engagement with the material. Her vessels, created over decades between Vienna and London, possess a quiet austerity that deliberately eludes conventional classifications. To truly engage with her work means paying attention to what is not immediately visible.

When asked whether she saw herself more as an artist or a craftswoman, Lucie Rie usually responded curtly: »I am a potter.« A sentence that unequivocally shows that the ceramist, born in Vienna in 1902, preferred not to dwell on such classifications—and their hierarchical implications. Nor did she want to philosophize at length and expansively about her work, as author and ceramist Edmund de Waal reports. She once answered an inquiry about a contribution to a book as follows: »I do not want to be in your book. I like to make pots—but I do not like to talk about them. I would answer your questions today, but they would be wrong tomorrow.« This statement, which de Waal classifies as a typically Viennese method »of getting to the point,« contains two insights about Lucie Rie.

On the one hand, everything in the influential ceramist’s life truly revolved around making; on the other hand, this more-than-direct answer also encapsulates Rie’s view that every new piece of ceramic is a new beginning. »To make pots is an adventure to me, every new work is a new beginning,« is one of Lucie Rie’s most frequently quoted sentences. Vienna was the starting point of her journey, consisting of countless small adventures. Lucie Rie, then still Luzie Gomperz, was born in 1902 in the Austrian capital and grew up in a middle-class Jewish home. Her childhood and youth were significantly shaped by her uncle Sándor Wolf, a respected Burgenland businessman with a large collection of ancient art treasures from various cultures. The fact that Roman pottery was among them significantly influenced Lucie Rie. »There were these fantastic Roman bowls that were floating. I always tried to copy those floating bowls,« she recalled many years later about her first encounters with her uncle’s ancient ceramic collection.

FROM VIENNA TO LONDON

Her artistic talent became apparent very early on, and on the advice of her private drawing teacher, she attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, where prominent artists such as Oskar Kokoschka and Josef Hoffmann taught. However, Lucie Rie was particularly drawn to Michael Powolny’s ceramics class. Yet, it was not he, but the architect and co-founder of the Wiener Werkstätte, Josef Hoffmann, who considered her first self-made vessel so good that he exhibited it in Brussels’ Palais Stoclet. As Tony Birks notes in his comprehensive biography Fired Earth, »Lucie’s work at the potter’s wheel was characterized by a rational approach and determination. She had internalized the design concept of the early Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, originally derived from architecture, according to which all everyday objects, from wallpaper patterns to chairs and greeting cards, had to fit into the overall architectural framework and form a harmonious whole. Her vessel shapes—cylinders and bowls—looked deceptively simple.« During and after her studies, Lucie Rie began experimenting with various chemicals and glazes, and she also delved deeply into the study of the raw materials used. This led, among other things, to the first »volcanic« glaze, which would later become characteristic of many of her works.

»Unlike her contemporaries, who were mostly making decorative and figurative ceramics, Rie was interested in the material and physical properties of clay and glazes. This can be linked to the modernist interest in truth to materials. She experimented with layering slips and glazes to achieve interesting surface effects,« describes curator Eliza Spindel of the initial phase of her work. In 1938, after Austria’s annexation by the Nazi state, Lucie Rie and her husband emigrated to London. In 1939, in Albion Mews, a then heavily neglected district of London, she discovered a garage with living space above it. The garage was converted into a pottery workshop and remained the focal point of her creative work until her death. To stay financially afloat during and after World War II, Rie primarily produced ceramic buttons and jewelry for fashion houses at that time. »Arriving in London in 1938, Rie found that her work was out of step with prevailing trends in British studio pottery,« says Eliza Spindel in an interview with the magazine STIRworld. She initially adopted the style of her colleague Bernard Leach, who was a few years her senior and a central figure in the British pottery world at the time. »First I tried to follow Bernard Leach’s rules—I made heavier pots and heavier shapes,« Rie describes the influence of her contemporary in a conversation with wildlife filmmaker and self-proclaimed Lucie Rie fan David Attenborough. Gradually, however, she moved away from his style and found her own, which, as Leach himself once noted, was characterized, among other things, by radical independence: »An outstanding quality of Lucie’s work is the degree to which it is free from the direct influence of other potters, ancient and modern.« Sir David Attenborough puts it this way: »Before her time Leach and his followers sought their inspiration from medieval England and twelfth century China. Rie showed how this ancient craft could produce new shapes and new colours.«

MOVED BY BEAUTY

After the war, Rie rediscovered the elegance of her early works, strongly influenced by Modernism. From the late 1950s, she expanded her style with new forms and glazes, including more organic shapes and textured surfaces. Her later work features vibrant colors and metallic glazes that convey a sense of opulence. Retrospectives were dedicated to her in 1967 at the Arts Council Gallery on St. James’s Square, in 1981 at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and subsequently at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. However, Lucie Rie never felt as comfortable in the spotlight as she did in her workshop in Albion Mews. The last major exhibition in which Rie participated as an active ceramist took place in August 1990 at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. The day after the opening, the then 88-year-old suffered a severe stroke, which brought an abrupt end to her pottery career. After her subsequent hospital stay, when asked about her future, she responded with a counter-question: »Haven’t I made enough pots?« Lucie Rie died on April 1, 1995, in her apartment in Albion Mews. In 1999, a solo exhibition was dedicated to her at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.

The living and bedroom (1926–1928) designed for Lucie Rie by architect Ernst Plischke for her apartment at Wollzeile 28;
rebuilt at the Hofmobiliendepot, Möbel Museum Wien.

Rie’s pottery studio, which had barely changed over the decades, has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London since 2009. In 2023, a bowl with the deep-drawn footring typical of her work, which lends a special lightness to her pottery, fetched a record sum of £330,200 at an auction by Phillips Auctioneers. Numerous friendships were also central to her work, such as with the aforementioned Bernard Leach, but also with her long-time workshop colleague Hans Coper and with the architect Ernst Plischke, who designed her Vienna apartment in Wollzeile. Rie formed an unusual friendly relationship in old age with the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake. Fascinated by her works, he organized an exhibition titled »Issey Miyake meets Lucie Rie« in 1989 at the Sogetsu Gallery in Tokyo. »I am often asked to speak of instances where I have been moved by beauty. Lucie Rie and her work represent some which most often come to mind,« reads a statement by Miyake about Lucie Rie.

PERFECT AND IMPERFECT

Lucie Rie’s successes can also be attributed to her unique technique, unusual for her time. In his biography, Tony Birks describes how colleagues who watched her potting always noted with interest that she used a kidney-shaped piece of metal, a simple tool curved like a comma, in her case made of copper, which replaced fingers in creating smooth surfaces on the inside or outside of a bowl. Furthermore, many of her thin-necked vessels were assembled from two parts. With the exception of her Bernard Leach period, she also meticulously ensured that the upper and lower parts of a ceramic piece were equally cleanly crafted. »Indeed, the bases of numerous works with sgraffito decoration, and also the later so-called knitted vessels, bear very finely incised, sometimes even painted-on patterns after turning, so that viewing her works from that period is akin to a revelation, like the sight of a sea urchin or the delicate drawing of an insect’s body under a magnifying glass,« writes Birks. For the sgraffito or inlay technique, Lucie used a sharp needle as a scoring tool. Radial, parallel lines arranged at an angle to the clay body and fine cross-hatching were typical of her works from the 1950s. Later, she combined cross-hatched sgraffito patterns with heavy glazes.

This resulted in the so-called »knitted« vessels. In the foreword to his biography, Tony Birks writes that Lucie Rie’s simple, yet immensely subtle and complex vessels owe their high degree of perfection not to a reduction to an ever clearer form, but equally to their robustness and fragility, a combination of opposites such as economy and abundance, light and shadow. »But it is probably above all the close proximity of perfection and imperfection, the inimitable Lucie Rie’s tremor, that captivates the viewer.« As a person, she embodied the same mixture of opposites, according to Birks. »Her delicate appearance and apparent fragility might sometimes have disguised the fact that she possessed an iron will and was capable of hard work.« The fact that Lucie Rie was not one of those people who constantly revolved around themselves should also be mentioned here. As cliché as it may sound: she always remained firmly grounded. With one exception: In a video showing David Attenborough’s visit to her studio, there is a scene where Lucie Rie dives so deep into her kiln that she loses her footing. Shortly before, in a brief exchange between the naturalist and the artist, the discussion was whether opening the kiln after firing would be akin to a revelation. Laughing, Rie replies: »Not a revelation, a surprise.«

ARTICLE FIRST PUBLISHED IN CHAPTER №XII »SIMPLICITY« — SUMMER 2025

David van der Leeuw is a Belgian photographer who works with a fine sense for the fleeting. Reflections, shadows, and permeable layers characterize his visual world. But what seems like poetic coincidence is the result of conscious experiments with material, perspective, and technique.

Chapter   Reflections, shadows, and subtle interventions seem central to your imagery. What draws you to these ephemeral elements?

David van der Leeuw   I’m drawn to moments that feel like they’re on the verge of disappearing. I like it when an image feels unstable, when it holds tension—when what’s visible is only part of the story, leaving the viewer wondering what is happening. I try to layer and obscure reality—sometimes through glass, water, or mirrors. These elements all create a certain ambiguity, which hopefully encourages the viewer to spend time decoding the image. I guess the short answer is: I try to make it feel more poetic than realistic.

Chapter   You often physically enter your photos through shadows. Can you talk about this performative gesture—is it about presence, authorship, or something more elusive?

David van der Leeuw   I don’t really know, to be honest—I guess it’s a mixture of all of the above. Sometimes it’s a way of including myself in the photo; sometimes it’s simply to add an abstracted layer to a scene that needs something more. Mostly, I think it has to do with creating a sense of mystery in my work—something that introduces a narrative or a human element, but still remains elusive.

Chapter   It appears that, conceptually, there’s a surreal, cinematic tension running through your work—where do you personally draw your inspiration from?

David van der Leeuw   I try to draw inspiration from everything around me, all the time. Sometimes it’s a line from a book, a city, a color, a newspaper article, a friend, a museum visit, or a dream… Overall, you could say cinema is my main influence—it inspires me in the most complete way, because it’s such a broad art form that encapsulates all the elements I just mentioned: image-making, storytelling, philosophy, music… there’s just so much in it to be inspired by.

Chapter   While AI is unlocking unprecedented possibilities in image making, there’s something almost magical about working with traditional methods. Could you also share a bit about the technical aspects behind how your images come to life?

David van der Leeuw   I try not to get too attached to a certain technique—I always aim to experiment and do things differently. I shoot with old analog cameras, digital ones, and even my iPhone. I photograph through different materials—glasses, fabric, whatever happens to be around me. Sometimes I use props to alter reality, but everything happens in-camera; I don’t use double exposures. In post, I sometimes crop images radically, reprint and rephotograph them, or remove entire color ranges. There’s never just one formula—I always try to experiment along the way.

ARTICLE FIRST PUBLISHED IN CHAPTER №XII »SIMPLICITY« — SUMMER 2025

What is the connection between a car and the visual arts? A motorized car is auto-mobile and autonomous; it was built to be on the road. The same applies to art: it stems from an inner movement, stands on its own and is constantly seeking new paths. Interesting things have emerged from both encounters.

The beginning. You learn it in creative writing. Presumably. It is recommended to start a speech or an article––preferably with rhetorical finesse––with a joke or at least a bon mot. Here, however, everything starts with an obituary. It just has to be, since he was so important: a brief remembrance of Marcello Gandini, the great Italian designer who left us forever a few months ago. His legacy is motorized and enchanting. Not only car enthusiasts feel that certain something when they stand in front of a Lancia Stratos, a Lamborghini Miura, but above all the Lamborghini Countach, which proves that automotive design of this kind is undoubtedly one of the points of contact with fine art and its sculptural bodies. Leaving aside the pleasure of sitting in these vehicles and being able to drive them, smelling their scent and enjoying their sound, it is their pure form and materiality alone that are so powerful that we are touched aesthetically and sensually. This is why cultural society has long paid homage to the mobile, which the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti brought into the museum in 1909 with the statement that a car roaring is »more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace«. At first, it was mainly photography and advertising graphics that took an artistic approach to the then very young technology. Then, in 1951, a museum, the famous MoMA in New York, decided to exhibit eight vehicles of equal value – curated by architect Philip Johnson. When the same institution finally added the first automobile to its collection of art and design 21 years later––an Italian Cisitalia 202 GT––it was finally established as a cultural asset. This is interesting, because Battista »Pinin« Farina, who had created the car in 1946, was not an artist but a designer. Nevertheless, those responsible at the MoMA did not question its inclusion in the fine arts at the time––apparently because the object-related aesthetic quality in form and material created an appropriate effect. Thanks to the simple clarity of its design, the immensely appealing big thing oscillates between toy character and living being thanks to its softly shaped body, the many sympathetic curves and the puppy-like front. This immediately perceived attraction, or rather beauty, caused the red sports car, which was ultimately created as a utility object, to tip into a new dimension: from object status to work of art.

Cisitalia 202 GT (1946), Pininfarina Design Studio, Cambiano, Turin

In this context, it is worth noting that while works of art have existed for tens of thousands of years, the examination of the automobile in art is very recent. However, the first reflections on the then unusually fast-moving and thoroughly technoid vehicle emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, and many an artist such as Pablo Picasso (Facel Vega), the writer Erich Maria Remarque (Bugatti), the musician John Lennon (Rolls-Royce) or the artist Joseph Beuys (Bentley) moved the vehicle, which soon became part of their private living space, with great awareness and pleasure. The 1960s and 70s marked an early high point, when the artistic approach to the automobile also expanded into a contemporary freedom of interaction––through depiction in paintings and photography, in which movement, technology and form are reflected. And today? Seventy years after that boom period, the situation is quite disparate. It seems as if everyone involved in the automotive world is subject to a fundamental uncertainty––the manufacturing companies and associations, the politicians with their different orientations and the extremely heterogeneous clientele in terms of demands and preferences. It is an interplay characterized by the insight into environmental pollution and consumer constraints, but also by the enthusiasm for innovative technologies and materials as well as the will to reform transport intelligently. Not for a long time has there been so many new concepts, technologies and designs to present, learn about, discuss and weigh up. In this respect, it is also up to the art scene to react to this.

But how does art do that? Imagine being an artist yourself, and it wouldn’t be a matter of designing a car, i.e. initiating a complex process and shaping technology, safety, economy and brand language into an overall design. Nor would it be a matter of buying one and getting by with hobbies, everyday pragmatism and a credit line. Rather, there would be absolute freedom of making. On the one hand, you would be standing in a frighteningly empty space, thrown back on your own head, on your own ideas and abilities, and on the other hand, you would be surrounded by countless real vehicles and types that you could deal with, their images, their history and stories, the implications and philosophical aspects of automobile culture. Oh holy Christophorus! If necessary, we could also ask Apollo with his chariot of the sun for inspiration, who, after all, would also be responsible as the god of fine arts. So what to do? What strategies are recommended for an artistic approach to the subject? Well, you could stylize the car and present it in its specific capacity as a design icon, as can be found in museums or in object photography very early on, but also in the hyper-realistic oil paintings of Don Eddy in the 1970s. Art generates a »image of the car«, which is not far removed from myth or fetish. And advertising is only too happy to pick up on this appeal when it comes to marketing this important industrial product: »Unique like a work of art« or »The most beautiful form of technology«, as VW and Alfa Romeo deliberately alluded to in their advertising.

Fabian Oefner, »Disintegrating X – Lamborghini Miura SV (1972)«, 2018

The intellectual, rational path is also conceivable: analysis. Fabian Oefner’s oeuvre is a very impressive example. The Swiss artist, who lives in the USA, developed a very unconventional approach to the automobile through meticulous visual dismantling. For example, he accompanied an Italian restoration team as they carefully dismantled one of the rare cars for maintenance and photographed more than a thousand components of the car’s original technology in individual shots in their workshop. These are then used to create digitally generated compositional views of a vehicle based on the principle of exploded views. Oefner’s aim is to use this analysis to visualize the complex functional structure of such an object and to amaze us with the paradoxical coincidence of design and disintegration, as he calls it: »I want to explore what surrounds us like this and arouse people’s curiosity.« Of course, we are aware that up to 10,000 individual parts normally come together to form a multifunctional module under the bodywork of a standard motor vehicle, behind the dashboard or in the upholstered seats. However, we always forget this. In view of these images, we have to realize for better or worse that the beauty of a Cisitalia 202 GT, as shown in the MoMA, or the silver Lamborghini Miura SV  by Fabian Oefner is de facto not as materially homogeneous as the massive marble sculpture of the Nike of Samothrace in the Louvre. An automobile is a magical work of technology and skill. No wonder the French philosopher and Citroën DS enthusiast Roland Barthes once wrote: »I believe that the automobile today is the fairly exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals. In other words: a great epochal creation designed with passion by unknown artists …« So there we have it again, art. So the automobile itself can be seen as an object of art. However, with its smooth sheet metal, which virtually invites surface design, it can also be a canvas or a picture support. The Paris-based designer Sonia Delaunay, for example, presented her avant-garde fashion in 1925 in a stylistically adapted Citroën, painted in a check design. Pablo Picasso also painted a car in 1958, more precisely the left flank of a car of the same brand, a blue Citroën DS 19. A journalist had visited him in exile in France with this car, and the artist, who was obviously very pleased about this, even signed his secretly painted motif. The most famous series of artistically designed bodies or creatively interpreted vehicles was initiated by the BMW brand in 1975: the BMW Art Car. Up to the current project by Julie Mehretu, which is presented in the cover story of this Chapter №X, titled »STATE OF THE ART«, 20 examples have been created to date on the basis of various BMW models––designed by Calder, Lichtenstein, Warhol or Koons. This strategy of artistic creation could be described as a reaction, as a specific view of an everyday object that is very central to people, whereby it naturally changes significantly and is viewed and treated completely differently after processing.

Asta Gröting, »Goethe’s traveling carriage, Adenauer’s Mercedes and my Smart«, 2012

A fourth approach to art attempts to explore and elaborate on the profound, on hidden qualities. The effect is often a poetic quality that suddenly turns the previously banal into the extraordinary. Such ambiguity is well exemplified in a work by Asta Gröting, whose title actually describes it completely: »Goethe’s traveling carriage, Adenauer’s Mercedes and my Smart«. The artist, who works in Berlin, installed three sub-views of this strange compilation of vehicles, each of which has an inherent importance: the genius writer’s carriage for the world, the Federal Chancellor’s limousine for post-war Germany and finally the knobbly little car for herself. However, you don’t see what is obvious, but what is normally hidden, i.e. the chassis, dampers, etc.––and you are supposed to think for yourself, pondering about mobility itself, about technical diligence, travel, history and the German people. The basis are scans of the originals, the end product is a soft form or thin layer of polyurethane that lies succinctly on the gallery floor.

Erwin Wurm, »UFO«, 2006

Another creative impetus used by art is the strategy of alienation, with which it creates uncertainty in the perception of familiar things and thus hopes to raise awareness. While excessive irritation can sometimes cause aversion, playing with change in a light-hearted way can be quite fun. This is why works such as those by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, which make use of a humorous deformation that retains a socially critical tenor but is more likely to make you smile. Think of his delivery van, whose rear end bends up against the wall of a house, or the fat cars that have been created since the 2000s. Wurm transforms an existing car with styrofoam, fiberglass and polyurethane so that it is almost crushed by its bulges––an obese body that is more than a reflection of the affluent society. Or he lets it float like a cloud-like blue disc, like a dream vision or a UFO, with the original greenhouse of a Porsche 924 inside. The audience recognizes that it was originally a normal car, but cannot escape the deformation of form and meaning. With a similarly playful irreverence, the Scotsman Chris Labrooy quoted the iconic Palm Springs motifs of mid-century modernist painting, as we know them from David Hockney. However, in his digital painting series »Palm Springs Porsche 911«, Labrooy cheekily replaced the shimmering water of a pool with twelve equally blue Carrera RSs, which bob close together and visually simulate the waves with their typical roofline. A contemporary further development of pop art painting, which even back then liked to devote itself to the car, only the VW Beetle, and not its sporty descendant.

Chris Labrooy, Series »Palm Springs Porsche 911« (Twelve Porsche 911 Carrera RS in a pool), n.d.

The next path that art could take would be that of questioning. By transposing the automobile from its usual position and form into a completely absurd one, viewers experience an irritating sense of uncertainty. Conrad Shawcross does this very skillfully by hanging a Lotus at an angle and upside down. The appearance and functionality, indeed the entire type of vehicle, are thus counteracted: from a desirable sports car, it becomes a huge, useless and helpless thing.

The last of the tactics presented here goes even further––provocation. It is particularly popular with artists who love dramatic and powerful actions. In addition, the public reacts most intensely to this, which is easy to do with the automobile as a workpiece, because in our product world it is not only one of the most expensive, but often also one of the most personally cherished possessions.

Conrad Shawcross, »Golden Lotus (Inverted)«, 2019; installation view Saatchi Gallery, London

It is understandable that a video intervention by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, in which she smashed the windows of parked cars in Zurich city center with a steel flower while prancing past, was not viewed without emotion. The sculptures by French artist César Baldaccini had a comparably echoey effect. In the context of Nouveau Réalisme, in 1960 he began to press car bodies into so-called Compressions dirigées, so that the public was suddenly not standing in front of a conventional sculpture, but in front of a metal cube that was nothing other than the result of a scrap metal pressing and contained a complete car. The contemporaneous works of the US American John Chamberlain, who assembled individual dented and rusted metal parts of defunct road cruisers into highly decorative sculptures, also became well known. The art world had to react to this provocation––a creative tactic that eventually weakened in its authentic, formal-aesthetic and socio-critical effect, so that conceptual successors such as Kevin Beasley can no longer do justice to it. You always have to be careful that it doesn’t become too banal, as was the case in 2011 when the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media mounted its exhibition »Car Culture« with numerous deformed vehicles, Beetles placed on top of each other in balls, a Mercedes rolled over by a tank or an SL filled to the brim with oil. HA Schult, who is not exactly sure of his style, was also involved with a car wreck installation »Crying Cars«.

Dirk Skreber, »untitled (Crash 1)«, 2009

What is important is the intense effect due to a new type of work statement that occurs in this thematic field related to the automobile: the decay of the glamorous product, the brutality of deformation or the dangerousness of fast movement. Dirk Skreber achieves this with skill. His everyday vehicles wrapped around steel poles are shocking, as it is impossible to escape the force of the assumed accident and the inevitable lethality of mobility associated with it. Interestingly, this effect of disturbance is mixed with a sense of cruel sculptural beauty. The best way to reassure oneself about a possible good outcome is with Marshall McLuhan’s ambivalent analysis of the times from 1964: »Behind the wheel, we transform ourselves into superhumans.« Nevertheless: the automobile in question … is dead.

The end. And so this text ends as it began––not with a joke, but once again with a memento mori. A remembrance of the many beautiful automotive companions of mankind that have lost their lives through fate––be it an accident, a burst piston, a natural disaster or simply shameful neglect and the associated nasty rust. After all––here, in the protected environment of art, we can be sure of the safety and care of our favorites.