Encountering the City: The Urban Experience in Contemporary Art
Kemper Art Museum at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
Washington University in St. Louis
1 Brookings Dr., St Louis, MO
Through January 4, 2015
Encountering the City: The Urban Experience in Contemporary Art, an exhibition arriving at the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, explores artists’ responses to the contemporary built environment. Paintings, sculptures, photography, and videos from internationally renowned artists in addition to those exhibited in the museum’s own collections, are presented by a sampling of artists including Franz Ackermann, Isa Genzken, Jakob Kolding, Sarah Morris, Gary Simmons, and Wolfgang Tillmans.
The exhibit focuses on the link between art and architecture and allows the artists to showcase their response to rapidly evolving environments, whether psychological or concrete, through different forms of media. Among them, Gary Simmons’ Plaza Inferno Grid (2008) illustrates a dystopian future in the wake of class and race issues in American society, while Jakob Kolding’s How to Build a Universe that Falls Apart Two Days Later (2014) analyzes planning versus completed architectural spaces. Encountering the City seeks to give visitors an insider’s view of the artists’ reactions to their own perceived architectural environments.
