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GALERIE LUCY MACKINTOSH ARTISTS SHOWS INFORMATION EVENTS |
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| Madelon Vriesendorp was born in 1945 in Holland. In 1964 she
studied in Amsterdam at the Rietveld Academy and later worked on
the restoration of old frescoes and as a designer of stage costumes,
books and jewelry. Five years later she enrolled at Central Saint
Martins School of Art in London. She exhibited her work at the
workshop and the Serpentine Gallery among others. In 1972 she moved to Ithaca and then New York with her husband, Rem Koolhaas. While in New York, Vriesendorp co-founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture with Koolhaas, Elia & Zoe Zenghelis. Paintings she produced at the time were used for book and magazine covers, notably on the cover of Delirious New York in 1978 by Rem Koolhaas. They were exhibited at the New York Guggenheim and Max Protetch Galleries, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Berlin’s Aedes Gallery and Gallery Ma in Tokyo among others. In 1976 Vriesendorp returned to London to work on numerous OMA competitions. She worked with Teri When-Damisch on an animated film for French television. In 1977 they had a daughter and in 1980 a son. From the mid 1980’s she taught art and design at a number of schools, including the Architectural Association and the Edinburgh School of Art. She designed a mural for the Dutch ‘Dans-theater’ in The Hague and exhibited with OMA in numerous Galleries and Museums. Over the last ten years she has worked with Charles Jencks, producing drawings and models to accompany many of his publications, and with her daughter, Charlie on several publications and art projects. More recently, Vriesendorp has produced illustrations for the publications Built, Domus and Abitare, while working on costumes, built objects, paintings and short stories. She had her first one-man show in January 2008, called The World of Madelon Vriesendorp, (+ a book of the same name) at the Architectural Association which went on to Aedes, Berlin in March and a reduced version to the Venice Architectural Biennale in September that year. A show in Basel opened in January 2009 at the Swiss Architectural Museum. She received an honorable fellowship from the RIBA on the 26th February 2009, and in June created an installation at the Venice Art Biennale of her ‘Mind Game’, for which she build large brightly coloured card-board objects for people to inter-act with. She designed a Chess set with Kees Christiaanse for the Rotterdam Biennale (Sept ‘09), She exhibited a design for the show ‘Contemplating the Void’ in the Guggenheim (Feb.’10) and an installation of her work in the exhibition «Dreamlands» in the ‘Centre Pompidou’ (May- Aug’10). In September ’10 Madelon will take part in a group show in the ‘Borges’ Institute in Buenos Aires with Sylvia Libedinsky and Nick Wadley. Madelon’s art-work has evolved dramatically over time. She has surrounded herself with her own scaled down universes - where buildings or objects (built or collected) come alive in alternative, more idyllic worlds. Initially through painting and illustration, and in the later stages of her career through the vast assemblage of objects that she has collected into what she calls her ‘object archive’; a collection of thousands of toys, souvenirs and curiosities from around the world, with which she makes strange miniature urban environments, setting up curious and loaded scenes. Madelon’s interest is in the relationships between objects. She believes that toys are portals to a parallel universe, in which you find the accidents of life, a constant cycle of random meetings and happenings. Madelon’s object archive takes small objects and turns them into global cities, a reversal from her paintings, which reduces buildings to human scale. The archive has a randomness that reflects human life and its cultural confusion. «Confusion is crucial to everything I do because it stimulates your imagination, to re-interprate and create your own myths.» she says. Her object archive, in which all cultures are represented, becomes more than a static collection, because of its density it reflects the experience of people living together in their own world, either in contrast or relating to each other. Madelon says her archive is largely a collection of failed objects. «I understand failure because I have made myself a permanent foreigner. As a foreigner you are a misplaced person, you misunderstand and equally you are misunderstood, because you are an outsider, in a sense you have failed. That is why I am interested in objects that have not fully met their potential or realised their design. Failed objects have something moving about them, in them you see ambitions that were never realised, they are outcasts and therefore alone, so I collect them and give them a new home, because of my empathy with their imperfections.» | ||||||||
