Ian Kiaer: Endnote, Ledoux
The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago
26 February – 22 April 2016
Ian Kiaer, ‘Endnote, Ledoux’, 2016, exhibition view, The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago. Courtesy: The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago; photo: RCH | EKH
Ian Kiaer, ‘Endnote, Ledoux’, 2016, exhibition view, The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago. Courtesy: The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago; photo: RCH | EKH
Ian Kiaer, ‘Endnote, Ledoux’, 2016, exhibition view, The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago. Courtesy: The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago; photo: RCH | EKH
Ian Kiaer, ‘Endnote, Ledoux’, 2016, exhibition view, The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago. Courtesy: The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago; photo: RCH | EKH
Ian Kiaer, ‘Endnote, Ledoux’, 2016, exhibition view, The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago. Courtesy: The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Chicago; photo: RCH | EKH
In ‘Endnote, Ledoux’, Neubauer Collegium Exhibitions presents new works by London-based artist Ian Kiaer, whose installation take the form of carefully composed landscapes of found objects and materials, architectural models, paintings, sculptures and projections. Ways of exploring paradigms and testing concepts, these arrangements tend to be provisional rather than permanent, and the questions they raise – What exactly constitutes the category of ‘painting’ today? How do we understand the relationship between sculptural fragment and architectural model? – are both deeply historical and necessarily contingent on their immediate context.
The new works in ‘Endnote, Ledoux’ continue a larger project that stems from the artist’s longstanding preoccupation with a volume of engravings by the eighteenth-century French architect Claude Nicholas Ledoux, in particular the image of Ledoux’s experimental design for a spherical house for the agricultural guards of Maupertuis. In this visionary image – a building as an uncompromising sphere set in an Arcadian landscape – Kiaer senses a concern for geometry and symmetry that resonates with the architecture of the Neubauer Collegium’s building itself, a former Unitarian seminary on the periphery of the University of Chicago campus.