Room for Thought, Lucy Mackintosh, 2011
Collaboration: Charlie Koolhaas
Lucy Mackintosh Gallery, Lausanne, Switzerland, 15 October to the 27th November 2010.
Although they have collaborated for many years, Mother and Daughter combined forces in an exhibition for the first time.
For Room for Thought, Madelon Vriesendorp & Charlie Koolhaas exhibited separate works with a collaborative piece joining the two exhibitions in the middle.
The fact that they are related means that one can see similar themes in their art – though they have chosen different tools and vocabularies with which to express themselves. Their aesthetics are derived from ‘celebrating everything you have no control over’, allowing random connections, accidental absurdities, the boring, the ugly and the mundane to inform their work and to point out its fragile or robust beauty.
Madelon exhibited all of her new works (since her show at the Architecture Association, London) as well as a selection of her earlier paintings. Her new work included her “Toy Paintings”, her “Life-Size Mind Game”, as well as her “Idol Tower” and “Chess Board” pieces. For her part, Charlie exhibited a series of five different windows to give the effect of standing in a living room and looking out onto five different global cities. Within a separated space is their collaborative work: a panopticon – a circular plywood structure with a series of rooms containing dramatic imaginary scenes, using both photographs and objects.
As a testament to their wonderment and curiosity at the new condition of our multi-cultural world, they have created a parallel universe for Room for Thought, where good taste, formal ideals and the notion of perfection have become obsolete, where all ideologies and disciplines are embraced and placed side by side, co-existing without conflict, where each scene tells its own story, un-judged and rejoiced.