Rosalind Barker

January 19th 2016 Maisons Fragiles  Hauser & Worth

Hauser & Wirth London draws together the work of nine artists in ‘Maisons Fragiles’, a group exhibition exploring themes of fragility, vulnerability and protection as they manifest in a variety of guises. Spanning 60 years of artistic practice, the exhibition includes work by Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Isa Genzken, Robert Gober, Eva Hesse, Roni Horn, Gordon Matta-Clark, Fausto Melotti and Richard Serra. These artists share an innate sympathy towards architecture and a common preoccupation with materiality; each exploits the properties of their chosen materials – whether that be reflection, transparency or malleability – in pursuit of a mastery of form and space.

Louise Bourgeois deals with notions of psychological fragility, as she explores fluctuating mental states, fluid definitions of identity, the subjectivity of memory and the precarious nature of human relationships. ‘Untitled’ Ink and Pencil on Paper 1946 31.5 x 17 .8 cm

Louise Bourgeois  ‘Maisons Fragiles’ 1978 Steel Two Elements.

Maisons Fragiles’ the work that lends its name to the title of this exhibition, confronts the deeply repressed issues that conditioned Bourgeois’s youth, and represents an exploration of the artist’s psyche. For Bourgeois, architecture functioned as a personification of the human condition. The perceived frailty of ‘Maisons Fragiles’ comments on the dialectical tension that exists between interior and exterior – the legs of the sculpture evoke the parameters of a house, while the empty interior speaks to the solitude of domestic life. Despite their fragile appearance, the structures are rendered in steel, endowing them with a strength and resilience that appears, at first glance, to be lacking. Although balanced precariously, the work’s frail appearance is only an illusion.), the work that lends its name to the title of this exhibition, confronts the deeply repressed issues that conditioned Bourgeois’s youth, and represents an exploration of the artist’s psyche. For Bourgeois, architecture functioned as a personification of the human condition. The perceived frailty of ‘Maisons Fragiles’ comments on the dialectical tension that exists between interior and exterior – the legs of the sculpture evoke the parameters of a house, while the empty interior speaks to the solitude of domestic life. Despite their fragile appearance, the structures are rendered in steel, endowing them with a strength and resilience that appears, at first glance, to be lacking. Although balanced precariously, the work’s frail appearance is only an illusion.

                   Fausto Menotti ‘The Launderers’ 1969 Brass

Louise Bourge ‘Lair’ 1986   Rubber, steel hook, cable.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            The works of Fausto Melotti are exercises in articulating space. The sculptures dispel sensations of ambiguity and fear – fragility is displayed not as a weakness, but instead represented asdexterity and serenity. Melotti’s ‘I lavandai (The Launderers)’ (1969) encapsulates the artist’s lyrical approach to sculpture, drawing on the lightness and tactility of the delicate materials from which it is crafted to create a work poised between geometry and representation, abstraction and narrative. It eschews the noise of welding or firing, carving or cutting, for an art whose power rests in the liminal, the border between seen and unseen, the physical and the ephemeral. Dematerialised to the point of weightlessness, the artist’s work stands in space like an aerial drawing, incorporating space and air into its essence.

                                 Eva Hesse ‘Inside 1’Acrylic, papier-mache, wood, cord,wire . ‘ Inside 11’ 1967   Acrylic, papier-mache, sawdust, wood, cord,metal, paper.

‘The delicate papier-mâché works by Eva Hesse take the form of geometric cubes, projecting a sense of containment and underscoring her interest in the psychological experience of domestic space. In ‘Inside I’, she covers an open wooden box with painted grey papier-mache. Deep in the bottom of this cube sits a snarly tangle of painted cords, wire and twine, a mass of snakelike forms that are statically fixed but anticipate hissing reverberations. ‘Inside II’ is similarly composed from a thick-walled open box that holds two amorphous weights wrapped in paper, bound with cord, and again painted grey. Throughout her sculptural work, Hesse responded to the rigidity of Minimalism by tangling, binding, complicating and enclosing space in order to underscore the expressive possibilities inherent in abstract sculpture. Provisional and raw, through rough edges, chance groupings, and the clash of smooth exteriors and irregular interiors, Hesse was able to register the expressive capacity of the body and the mind.’