Description Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia – curated by Lynne Cooke
Description
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
curated by Lynne Cooke
January–April 2011
Exhibition views:
Hannes Boeck
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Madrid
[…] For Dorit Margreiter, debate about the preservation of late-modernist architecture provides the occasion for probing larger issues shaping our contemporary sociocultural context: the legacy of the Modernist Movement; the ways that media representations of the built environment inform our collective imaginary; the consequences of the growing interdependence of architecture and spectacle culture. Description, her first major survey show, comprises a rigorously selected body of interconnected works made over the past seven years whose subjects limn two broad thematics. These thematics provide a conceptual structure underpinning the exhibition which visitors to Description may experience as dual axes or trajectories
running through the show. Key among the earlier works presented here is a short film appropriately titled zentrum (2006). It has spawned a nexus of interrelated pieces centred on an eponymous typeface Margreiter created that same year. The protean font is, in turn, the kernel for a quartet of new works. Monumental metal mobiles, these sculptures reference her earlier text-based works in that they are composed from the same letterforms. When considered as moving images, however, their closest affinities lie with her film and video works. The four installations involving projection articulate the show’s thematics from multilayered perspectives.
[…]
Not polemic but description was the rhetorical mode Margreiter chose when conceiving this exhibition. Her even-handed presentation privileges neither of the two trajectories underpinning Description: the preservation debates encircling the Modernist Movement and its flawed legacy; and that discursive realm grounded in display and dedicated to the designing of experience. While clearly identified as fundamentally different, these twin axes have not been articulated as binary alternatives: they are shown to be consonant. The diverse guises in which architecture is represented in today’s image-saturated culture constitutes the starting point from which she creates models that serve as heuristic devices – as ways of unpacking the sociocultural mediations that shape and govern the built environment.
Text by Lynne Cooke
Exhibition catalog
Art for Life by Rike Frank, Texte zur Kunst (June 2011)