German artist Isa Genzken’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in 2014 demonstrated the breadth and variety of her work including large scale installations. In the late 80s and early 90s, she was experimenting with painting including the series Basic Research (1989-1991) currently on show in the first floor galleries at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.
From a distance, against the white walls of the gallery, the paintings appear deceptively simple panels in a limited palette of colours; close up the shapes of fields, houses and alien landscapes appear. This work has been compared to that of Gerhard Richter, due to Genzken’s relationship with him at that time, though Genzken’s painting is more restrained, resembling the qualities of aerial photographs.
While Eloise Hawser is a British artist, graduating from The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford in 2007, there is a link with the German art scene through her studies at the Stadelschule, Frankfurt under the German artist Tobias Rehberger, who, in 2014, transformed HMS President along the Embankment in London into a Dazzle Ship.
Her first UK solo institutional exhibition, Lives on Wire, in the ground floor gallery is a clever site-specific installation which reflects her interest in the technology used in early 20th century cinema organs invented by the British telephone engineer Robert Hope Jones to replace cinema orchestras with mechanisms with sent electric and pneumatic signals from the organ keyboard to remote musical pipes and instruments within the architecture of the buildings.
The centrepiece is a working machine known as the cinema organ colour changer which created changing light effects within art deco cinemas and which here controls the colour and brightness of the gallery’s lights, showing how an apparently redundant old piece of equipment can be transformed for a modern use.
In the adjacent Reading Room “Everything is Architecture: Bau Magazine from the 60s and 70s”, is a major exhibition of the Vienna-based architectural magazine Bau: Magazine for Architecture and Urban Planning, published by the Central Association of Austrian Architects at this period of experimental ideas in Austrian architecture when architects and artists such as Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, Günther Feuerstein, Oswald Oberhuber, Sokratis Dimitriou and Gustav Peichl oversaw its editorship and when the magazine explored links between architecture and the wider world of art, society, politics and pop culture, with contributions by philosophers, artists and architects.
