Building Blocks at Zuostant / Berlin

Artist(s): Larissa Fassler, Ana Cantoni, Julie Beugin, Julieta Ortiz de Latierro
Curator: Julie Beugin
Art space: Zuostant
Address: Nazarethkirchstr. 37, 13347 Berlin
Duration: 12/07/2024 - 21/07/2024
Credits: Julie Beugin

The four artists in the group exhibition Building Blocks break down the architecture of everyday life in the city into modular sections, then recombine these ‘building blocks’ into new meanings. All based in Berlin, they work in disparate mediums of sculpture, drawing, painting and photography and share a preoccupation with processes of hand-made, material transformation. Through cutting, pasting, folding and building, these four artists subvert their ‘building blocks’ from their original utilitarian function, and translate the constant change of daily life into ambiguous new possibilities.

In her sculpture Les Halles (1850, 1980, 2010), Larissa Fassler traces the building and rebuilding of the Paris marketplace over the space of 160 years. In her sculptures, she transforms forms derived from the 1850s pyramidal roofs, the 1980s white parasols, and elements from its present sleek, organic forms into modular rearrangeable sculptures. By collapsing times and architectural styles together, she visualizes the normally invisible shifts of style, material and design in one site over time and makes them simultaneously present.

Ana Cantoni’s pink-red wood, fabric, and plaster sculpture suggests a table-top model of urban space, yet the focus on colour and materiality over logical representation creates a sense of warmth and physicality that subverts expectations of an analytical model. Similarly, her series, “Salt and Glass,” consists of small scale drawings that are poetic translations of observed architecture in the town of Salzwedel. Made while attending an artist’s residency there during the pandemic, she uses coloured pencils to reimagine patterns of brick walls and everyday architecture such as bus shelters into atmospheric optical forms.

Julie Beugin recombines small transitory moments of the everyday city in her photographic collages. By digitally cutting and pasting close-up details, surfaces and textures, she transforms the utilitarian structures of windows, stairs and balconies in Berlin into intertwining geometries. Then in her large scale paintings she uses wide fluid brushstrokes to abstract the shapes from her collages into overlapping spaces of light and colour. She uses the two mediums to place an aesthetics of form and illusion in tension with the ordinary details of the city, transforming the everyday into puzzling spaces that invite close looking.

Rather than working with the architecture of the city, Julieta Ortiz de Latierro suggests architectural forms through her transformation of a common element of daily life: receiving official letters in the mail. These letters are often a cause for fear, due to the possibility of unexpected bills or distressing news, especially for those who find themselves in precarious situations. She cuts and folds the everyday bureaucracy that arrives in the mail into playful pop-up architecture. Photographed on saturated colour backdrops and altered so they become difficult to read, they are transformed from their original context of worry and instead offer absurd relief from the pressures of bureaucratic obligations.

During the exhibition’s finissage on July 21st, Julieta Ortiz de Latierro will host a public workshop where she invites the public to bring their own letters to Zuostant to learn how to transform them into pop-up sculptures, connecting the four artist’s abstractions of the architecture and life of the city into the daily life of the gallery visitors.