A 4 minute
directed by Laurence Ellis

source: redcatorg

For his first solo show in Los Angeles, Pablo Bronstein produces an installation and a series of performances in the gallery space and theater. Based in London, Bronstein explores public spaces and architectural styles through the study of the social protocols and lifestyles of their time. His work often combines references to the history of architecture—from Roman antiquity and the Baroque to Neo-classicism and Post-modernism—with hints to art history—from the Renaissance to the Modern period. Examining choreographic and architectural elements within a critical framework, Bronstein’s projects transform the exhibition space into a semblance of a stage, in the manner of a tableau vivant, wherehe explores links between classical architecture and contemporary urbanism, between settings and decors, and between art and dance.

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Pablo Bronstein lives and works in London. His works have been presented at The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2013), the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (2011), The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2009), and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich (2007). His work was also featured in numerous group exhibitions including Tate Live: Performance Room at the Tate Modern, London (2012); MOVE: Choreographing You Hayward Gallery, London; Haus der Kunst, Munich and K20, Dusseldorf (2010-2011); The Garden of Forking Paths at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. Pablo Bronstein participated in Manifesta 8 (2010-2011), Performa 07, The Second Biennial of Visual Arts, New York (2007) and the Tate Triennale, Tate Britain, London (2006). His books Postmodern Architecture in London (2007) and Ornamental Designs (2008) are published by König Books.
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source: bdonlinecouk

“I’m not interested in helping people,” says Pablo Bronstein. “I don’t care about their lives, and how I can improve them.”

This is one of the many reasons why he is not an architect. Instead, the artist – now 33, with exhibitions opening simultaneously at London’s ICA and Copenhagen’s Charlottenborg Palace, with work in both the Tate and Saatchi collections, and a solo show at New York’s Met under his belt – dropped out after three weeks at the Bartlett.

“I was told I didn’t have the patience to be an architect,” he says. “And I found it all so straight.” After leaving to train in fine art at the Slade and Goldsmiths, a period he recalls as one of desperately trying to make “conceptual” work, he returned to what he loves most: drawing buildings.

Dreamlike assemblages, his drawings sample motifs from across the annals of architectural history with promiscuous relish – from 18th century palazzos to Neo-Georgian Barratt homes – constructing a fantasy world of imaginary monuments. They are an orgy of pediments and pilasters, columns and corbels, all rendered with an alluring stage-set flatness. Think Ledoux meets Quinlan Terry, squeezed through the knowing lens of Aldo Rossi – a heady concoction.

“I’m interested in the cheapness of it all,” says Bronstein, who is particularly drawn to Georgian and postmodern periods for this reason. “They were both about big lumps that were desperate to please. Simple structures with applied ornament – the ultimate developer architecture.”

In his ICA exhibition, which takes over the whole of Nash House for the first time, a gauntlet of 66 elevational drawings ascends the grand staircase, a series of facades with progressive levels of appliquéd decoration. Entitled Designs for the Ornamentation of Middle Class Houses, these are stripped – almost Loosian – frontages, variously embellished with stuck-on mouldings, like perverted pages from a Georgian pattern book. “The applied ornament trade is just a wonderful thing – the cheaper the better,” he smiles, recalling his childhood in 1980s Neasden: long afternoons in the DIY megastore fondling Laura Ashley curtain tassels and drooling over MDF mouldings.

Upstairs, a vast broken-pedimented cabinet dominates one gallery. This piece of Frankenstein furniture opens out, complete with huge baize-covered desk, to become an elaborate bureau – a grotesque homage to the live-work home-office. Next door, two console tables are wheeled together and unfolded, transformer-like, to become a day bed, while epic drawings of the erection of Paternoster Square column and the Temple Bar look on, depicted like heroic 17th century events.

In Copenhagen, visitors will be invited to urinate in a giant Ledoux-style pissoir that drains on to the gallery floor

Bronstein is fascinated by these power-dressed civic gestures, which were prevalent in the 1980s and celebrate what he describes as the “aesthetic of publicness.” He is keen on areas like Paternoster Square that “mimic the idea of the civic,” but of course are not. “They don’t belong to anyone, other than arms dealers, but they are very good at what they do.”

His 2008 book, Postmodern Architecture in London, features a catalogue of the overblown excesses of the City during this period, rejoicing in such icons as No 1 Poultry and Farrell’s MI6 building, all depicted as Piranesian ruins encrusted with ivy and encased in scrollwork.

“It was at a time when everyone was having the biggest wank-fest about Bauhaus in the art world, at the height of this pseudo-left posturing,” he explains. “Celebrating Thatcherism was not cool at all.” He is a particular fan of Foggo’s Broadgate development, and would happily see it listed.

“Its squares are always full of people eating lunch, looking exactly like they did when it was promoted in those horrible hand-rendered pictures,” he enthuses with glee. “It does its job so well that in a way it’s wrong of sophisticated and intelligent architects to not at least explore it critically.”

Bronstein is more than aware of his liberated position outside the profession that enables him to employ and critique the vocabulary of a discipline of which he is happily not part. His is a process of role play, of imagining a client and a brief and getting into character, but remaining safely removed from the realities of construction. He is not interested in the technicalities of building, nor even in the rules of proportion, and is bored by Rossi’s writings on the city. But would he build at scale, given the chance? “In an instant!” he responds. “But it would have to be very gestural.”

The ICA show features a monumental box – one of his largest works to date. It is a flimsy plywood shell capped with a heavy off-the-peg cornice – a kind of inverted mirror image of the blank interior of the gallery, inside which it barely fits. He has also built a miniature opera house on a hill outside Zurich, a pavilion for an audience of five to watch the performance of a single Scarlatti aria. In Copenhagen, meanwhile, his show features a giant Ledoux-style pissoir, in which visitors will be invited to urinate, little spouts draining out on to the gallery floor. “I think it is an overlooked aspect of architecture, that people regularly piss against buildings,” he says. “This is a homage to the right of the human to piss.”

As for contemporary architects he admires, he shrugs with lack of interest, although admits to liking Caruso St John’s proposals for Tate Britain – “because they are unashamedly ornamented” – but thinks the lacy facade of the practice’s Nottingham Contemporary gallery is “just sort of tacky”.

And Prince Charles and his band of modern traditionalists? “I quite like the theatre of gaudiness, the tacky horror of the whole situation,” he giggles. “Yeah, fuck it, bring it on.”