Graphic Precarity

June 2019

MIT, Part Objects seminar with Hans Tursack, shown in Part Objects: Precarious Structures and Other Forms of Sculptural Disorder, Keller Gallery

The model from above at an angle: a white board inlaid with red and orange acrylic shapes, a grey plate, and bent aluminium wires rising off it

This model for the student exhibition Part Objects: Precarious Structures and Other Forms of Sculptural Disorder is a response to the unintended collaboration between Peter Halley and Alessandro Mendini. In Halley’s talk at the Garage Museum in Moscow in 2017, he recounts being commissioned for a permanent exhibition at a hotel in Italy designed by Mendini. Halley did not install the painting himself, and the curator held off on sending him photos of the installation because Mendini had decided, without his knowing, to design the wall paintings upon which Halley’s paintings were hung. “My friend [the curator] thought I would be very angry about it – but I actually loved it!” The result was a collaboration between the two at Galleria Massimo Minini, pictured below.

Halley’s saturated paintings hung on walls drawn over with Mendini’s thin black lines, at Galleria Massimo Minini

The exhibition pieces combine Halley’s minimal, rich, saturated color fields with Mendini’s thin, black, circulatory lines that engage the figure-ground and reference socio-cultural connections in Halley’s work. The exhibition model expands on this collaboration by folding in three-dimensional, structural, precarious aspects, creating a dialogue between the ground plane, used as a graphic datum, and thin wires that rise from the plane and extend beyond the bounds of the model.

Axonometric drawing of the model on its plinth, the red and orange shapes on the board and the wires in outline

Looking down on the grey plate as it overhangs a red disc, beside a clear acrylic fin

Close view along the board’s edge: a clear fin and a short red fin standing on the red and orange inlays

Bent wire frames rising out of a red band that ends in an orange ring

Eye level with the board: a wire triangle held up on a red post, the grey plate below it