The World of Interiors June 2022

Left: at Casa Ortega there is one big open social room with multiple sitting areas as well as a dining one. The deeply religious Barragán often found room for a few choice pieces of an- tique Catholic statuary. His frequent collaborator, Clara Porset, the Cuban- born designer who arrived in Mexico in the mid-1930s, supplied the dining table and chairs. Above: against a typical accent wall in pink, the painting from 1958 is by Jose Raúl Anguiano Above: flanked by a pair of mid-20th- century green glass vases produced in Guadalajara by Odilon Avalos sits a large silver punchbowl made by Alfredo Ortega, celebrated silversmith and the original owner of the house. Left: the nuanced relationship be- tween inside and outside is a hallmark of Barragán’s work. Seen from the exterior, the large dining-room win- dow is level with the garden but, from within, its bottom sits at console height



influence of local architecture – itself already a mixture – with what he had seen in North Africa and in the gardens of Ferdinand Bac. In 1931 Barragán returned to Europe. He attended a lecture by Le Corbusier, called by at his Paris studio and also visited the apartment that the Crow designed for the eccentric millionaire Carlos de Beistegui (WoI April 2022) facing the Arc de Triomphe, with its surreal salon perched on top of the building, incorporating a fireplace but no roof. It is said that this experiment was one of the seeds that germinated in Barragán’s roofless rooms, which frame the open sky, that were characteristic of his third period, although he had already tried them in the second. In that second period – consisting of constructions with a simpler geometry and in the International style that Moma had so dubbed in another exhibition of 1932 – the Mexican transformed his architecture. For a start, he eschewed the explicit references to haciendas, North Africa and Bac, and in the process rebuilt his image as a sophisticated urban architect steeped in Modernism. But, with great success, he also enhanced his skill as a real-estate developer, beginning with small houses and apartment buildings, until he reached the new neighbourhood of Jardines del Pedregal. Set in a remarkable landscape of volcanic rock, the gardens here are as important as the architecture itself – or, rather, they are also architecture. A few years prior, Barragán began to develop what would be his third and best- known period. And he did so with a garden. Followed by a letter. In the early 1940s, Barragán bought a large, elongated piece of land in a popular district west of Mexico City. There he began to design gardens that reminded him of Bac’s and those of the Alhambra, but also those of the ranches of his childhood. And alongside the garden, he erected a house between 1940 and 1942 that he inhabited until 1947. Then he finished another one, next to it, which we all know as Casa Barragán, selling the first one to Left: originally conceived as a bedroom, this space was reconfigured as a library by the architect Arturo Chávez Paz after it suffered water damage in 1961. Among various original Porset pieces here are several of her bancos lecheros, or milking stools. The coffered door design has only been seen elsewhere at the Casa Galvez, 1954-55. Top: painted gourds from Oaxaca dot the coffee table

Right: in autumn 2021 the Dutch archi- tect Anne Holtrop hosted a workshop that later led to this temporary installa- tion in the garden, which is an exten- sive network of patios and walled-in spaces, both wild and manicured. Below: there are many changes of level, inside and out, and the same vol- canic stone paving further unites interior and exterior. Nothing is ‘slick’ in the Barragán lexicon – it’s all about appre- ciating the handmade and the local Right: if colour is a fundamental ele- ment of Barragán’s work, pink is the hue most associated with him. It is here he first employed it in multiple locations, and usually on floors and ceilings. A first rosy pink was not used again – it evolved into what would become this signature shade, as indel- ibly linked to him as blue was to Yves Klein. Some of the recinto floor paving slabs have inscriptions as they were likely salvaged from older buildings Alfredo Ortega, whose father had founded a silver shop in Mexico City. By the end of the 1940s, its objets had become renowned in the city. Years later, the Ortega family would end up commissioning two more houses on the same street, designed by Arturo Chávez Paz. Casa Ortega, as Barragán’s first house on Francisco Ramírez Street is now known, is also garden and house made one. Somehow, though, it all feels less con- trolled, with a strong dash of Romanticism. It’s as if the home begins as a kind of ruin, with shrubs and trees trying to reclaim it for the vegetable kingdom. The proportions and spatial strategies of Barragán’s other house seem secondary to another key theme of his architecture: atmosphere. We can think of Casa Barragán as an intérieur in Walter Benjamin’s sense of somewhere necessary ‘to sustain [the private bourgeois individual] in his illusions’. This domestic space is made up of interiors that fold inside other inte- riors but also open up to the garden. By contrast, Casa Ortega is an observatory made of small spaces that invite you to stay, and look out from. Though there’s no way to prove it, the house always strikes me as allowing a more relaxed and comfortable way of living than Casa Barragán, with its obsessively calculated stage set-up. And, finally, the letter. When he began landscaping the garden that accompanied the Ortega House and his own, Barragán wrote to his clients announcing his retirement from architecture. Henceforth, he would dedicate himself only to his own creations. Initially, the engineer became an architect, a practitioner of regional then International style, then he branched out into developing real estate. Now he stated that he would make his world – one of personal references and experiences, of travels and books, of ambition and speculation – the whole world. Like the hero of his youth, Ferdinand Bac, the mature Barragán became what he had always really been: a gardener, one who knew that the inside and the outside, landscape and architecture, could not be separated $ Casa Ortega, 22 General Francisco Ramírez, Colonia Ampl. Daniel Garza, Delegación Miguel Hidalgo, 11840 Ciudad de México, is open for guided tours. For more information, ring 00 52 55 8691 2729, or visit ortegamexico.com



NOBLE SALVAGE When in 2002 Cyril and Stéphanie de Ricou bought a dilapidated ôtel on the outskirts of Paris, they knew it would take a lifetime to restore its aristocratic grandeur. Good thing, then, that the couple run a world-class atelier specialising in historic surface decoration. Indeed, what was once a palace of entertainments for the colourful duke of Guînes has lured the ideal occupants, as Marie-France Boyer reports. Photography: Ivan Terestchenko This page: a contrapposto Apollo stands in a niche on the façade. Opposite: double doors leading from the small Blue Room into the large reception room are flanked by a Louis XVI armchair and an 18th-century cylinder desk signed Aubry. Sittings editor: Marie-France Boyer



This page: a beautifully restored stucco lunette, in which foliage morphs into putti, is topped with a cornice of oak leaves and painted trompe-l’oeil stonework. Opposite: this niche was originally a deeper alcove holding a bed when the Blue Room was intended for sleep





The large reception room, in the Louis XVI style, is highly symmetrical, a fact emphasised by the forest of faux-marble half and quarter Ionic columns. Above the door is a panel representing Clio, muse of history, and, higher still, two putti support the Guînes coat of arms

This page: breaking the architectonic frame, putti support the illusion that the room is open to the sky. Opposite: partially hidden by a bronze krater, this stucco panel encapsulates rural life, a wide-brimmed hat perhaps alluding to Marie-Antoinette, playing shepherdess at the Petit Trianon





Opposite: a Directoire chair and porcelain belonging to Stéphanie’s family adorn the dining room, with its deep recessed cabinet. This page: at the back of the building, it serves as an antechamber to the two adjoining reception rooms. The faux-marble décor here has yet to be restored by the atelier

IN COURBEVOIE, a Parisian suburb not far Known as ‘the magnificent one’, the duke was a colourful, seductive dandy. Painted by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s father, he from La Défense, Hôtel de Guînes is a large, if unassuming, man- was a distinguished war veteran, and had lived in Berlin, then sion situated in the remains of a park, one that boasts an Anglo- London where, as ambassador, he failed to make a great impres- Chinese pavilion, fake rocks, vegetable gardens, greenhouses, an sion. An excellent flautist, he was a friend of the young Mozart, orchard and sheep pens. Walking through the front gate, you commissioning him to write the Concerto for Flute, Harp and immediately spot the blue-and-white Egyptian-style façade; pilas- Orchestra; he failed to properly compensate the composer, how- ters, sphinxes and Greek gods nestled in its alcoves draw the eye. ever, causing major ructions. But Marie-Antoinette, the queen, protected the duke. Though highly cultured, he had a great sense In 2002, Stéphanie and Cyril de Ricou immediately fell for its of fun, happy, for example, to hide in the Petit Trianon gardens charm. A certain Henri de Frémont, aged 93 and a father of 12, and play the flute dressed as a shepherd. had been living in this house since 1930. Everything was dilapi- dated, mouldy, ravaged by humidity. In 2012 the Ricous moved Guînes’s aristocratic reception room was so ambitious in size in with their family and set about restoring the façade, followed (7.80m × 6.50m) that the architecture of the house had to be by the 18th-century rooms. They rewired the electrics and completely overhauled. The décor of faux marbling and plaster stripped away the wallpaper and carpets, resigning themselves mouldings is arranged around eight pairs of Ionic half-columns to the fact that rescuing such a building would last a lifetime. with additional ones in the corners. The painted ceiling, centred on an eagle spreading its wings, is enlivened by groups of putti They’re no strangers to restoration. Childhood friends, they who are either warriors or musicians – both representing topics come from similar cultured backgrounds. Stéphanie was always dear to Guînes’s heart. Above the doors, medallions represent- into art, and attended the Van der Kelen School in Brussels. ing maternity, knowledge and history meet panels depicting There, she befriended Lila de Nobili, a confidante of interior music, architecture and country life that sit above bronze-like designer Renzo Mongiardino and a set designer for Visconti’s consoles with menacing eagle heads extending from lion paws. film productions. Cyril, meanwhile, attended the Ecole Nation- ale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts in Paris, worked on Marly’s horses The Blue Room is much more modest, but just as pleasant. and on Gothic cathedrals with the art conservators Marie-Lys de Boiston had originally designed it as a bedroom, with an alcove Castelbajac and Michel Bourbon. between pillars facing a mantelpiece. The duke turned it into a petit salon en suite with the reception room. Much like its larger Shortly after their wedding, in 1989, they set up Atelier de neighbour, the décor has Masonic influences, but is also influ- Ricou, and their first project was restoring the cupola on the enced by the Queen and reminiscent of Wedgwood or Robert Church of Saint-Roch, Paris. Today, the couple employ between Adam’s work, which Guînes had admired in Britain. In front of 20 and 40 artisans, depending on the project. They now have a chimney, a recess lies between two Neoclassical columns, several hundred of these under their belt including the Hôtel de la under a fresco. Here, you can see a lyre with a crown of radiant Marine in Paris (WoI Dec 2021), the Crillon and Lutetia hotels, northern stars, crossed torches, and cherubs surrounded by the Galerie Véro-Dodat (a covered arcade), the Louvre in Abu vases and flower garlands. Completed in 1788, just before the Dhabi, and several private châteaux and manors. They have French Revolution, it has remained fairly untouched since. come up with nymphaea, Neo-Gothic pavilions and Baroque salons. This year, the French embassy in New York has tasked them Among the several owners who preceded the Frémonts and with dreaming up a large reception room with faux marbling and the Ricous was Nicolas Jean Francastel, a nouveau-riche jeweller gilding. Their multidisciplinary team, many of whom work from who had come through the Revolution unscathed. He moved to the Ricous’ home, specialise in decorating walls and ceilings Courbevoie in 1797 with his workers and couldn’t quite believe using frescoes, mouldings, trompe l’oeil, stucco or patina. how luxurious the house was. ‘These splendid rooms… this immense park filled with magnificent trees!’ How far should a restoration go? Should there be an empha- sis on giving a surface back its golden sheen or settling on a Delighted with the labyrinth of stairways and floors, the tiny certain shabby chic, with remnants respected? Such questions rooms and royal chambers, Stéphanie and Cyril have wanted to always crop up; the issue of how much to opt for architectural keep all traces of the different periods dating from the 17th consistency versus historical authenticity is ever present. With century and to live a simple, bohemian life. They host concerts in the overseers of public monuments often seeking out their the large reception room, dine in four or five different places and services, Stéphanie and Cyril typically work with architects and make jam from the fruit in the garden. They often find them- other experts, taking stock at every stage of the project. selves in their tiny, dated triangular kitchen, which they always promise themselves to do up. Part of their team works on the At their house in Courbevoie, they soon learned that the man premises, such as the neighbouring architect who occupies a behind its eye-catching décor is the sculptor and ornamentalist contemporary office right next to a faux-marble sample room Jean-Baptiste Boiston. A very popular figure, he had worked where the original 17th-century ceilings have been restored. with Ledoux, and moved to the area in 1776. At first, Boiston Juxtaposition is everywhere: a small, pink, freshly painted bed- bought a vineyard grouping several old houses. He then com- room brushes up against a Louis XVI-era mezzanine with strips bined it into one big, disparate building where he set up private of ‘domino’ wallpaper. Here cheek by jowl lie rooms decayed, apartments and workshops. In 1784, he rented out the house to contemporary, grand, shabby; telling many tales, this house has Adrien-Louis de Bonnières, the Duke of Guînes, and his wife, become an unexpected trap for the imagination $ the Princess of Montmorency, granting them a lease for life. The Atelier de Ricou. Ring 00 33 1 46 91 07 55, or visit atelierdericou.com duke was looking for a place to entertain, even if he was not plan- ning to live at the hôtel extensively. A plaster copy of Hercules’ Foot by Astier de Villatte is planted before a panel composed of a starburst and a lyre. The duke would have been influenced by both Wedgwood and Robert Adam, but there are Masonic touches in the symbolism, and the Rococo femininity channels the French queen



inspiration Some of the design effects in this issue, recreated by Gareth Wyn Davies 1 1 Diana Vreeland might have easily de­ RESEARCH: ARIADNE FLETCHER AND DAVID LIPTON 2 3 clared pink‘the navy blue of Luis Barra­ gán’ and not just India, so smitten by the 4 colour was he.And lo, there it is on Casa 5 Ortega’s walls (page 196), which 6 find their match in ‘Carmine’ by Little Greene (£52 for 2.5 litres of 7 emulsion). Visit littlegreene.com. 2 If, like us, you swooned at Polly Devlin’s wallpaper (page 183) you’ll be longing to know what it is.The answer: Braque­ nié’s‘Fleurs Anciennes’ (£183 per m). Ring 020 7376 5599, or visit pierrefrey.com. 3 How apt that a keen observer of life’s minutiae should cherish the itsy­ bitsy beauty of bonsai (page 177). Take a leaf out of writer Polly’s book with this – careful now – Fukien tea tree from The Stem (£28).Visit thestem.co.uk. 4 If you go boom bang a bang at a bit of Madeleine Castaing, be­ hold Alexia Leuschen’s drapes (page 156) in ‘Rayure Fleurie’by Edmond Petit from Turnell & Gigon; £188 per m.Visit turnellandgigon.com. 5 Treillage looks très chic in the Fifth Avenue mansion (page 156), n’est-ce pas? It’s the work of Accents of France, a leading light in lattice, off­the­peg and (from $7,500) bespoke. Ring 001 323 653 4006,or visit accentsoffrance.com. 6 When’s a kitchen not a kitchen? When it is by Henry Timi, designer of the stone­on­stone Milan flat (page 166),and resembles a catafalque (from £66,000 approx).Visit henrytimi.com. 7 Start saving if the Timi pad has turned you on to travertine (page 166):this Francesco Balzano table is $43,250 at Studiotwentyseven…Visit studiotwentyseven.com. 8 Anh Duong has got high/low down pat in the East Village. Witness the £50 ‘Nymåne’ lamp from Ikea hanging close by her Julian

Schnabel portrait (page 189). 8 9 10 Visit ikea.com. 16 11 12 15 9 Memphis coup: after 13 17 14 eyeing Anh’s Ettore Sott­ sass fruit bowl (page 189), we sought a cen­ trepiece­worthy alternative by him. The result:an‘Imera’vase (£4,458 approx). Visit memphis­milano.com. 10 Sadly Ralph Lauren no longer sells the amethyst velvet making up the Manhattan bedroom curtains (page 193). Trust John Lewis to cushion the blow with this mauve number (£20).Visit johnlewis.com. 11 A consummate colourist,Anh Duong would relish these Schiaparelli­pink ranuncu­ lus from Flowerbx (£115 for 25 stems), a good stand­in for the stems clashing so happily with her curtains (page 193).Visit flowerbx.com. 12 A total Babe: Daniel Romualdez had a cer­ tain socialite in mind when he designed the sofa in the ‘shotgun’ (page 186); as did upholsterer Anthony Lawrence­Belfair when it made ‘Paley’ (from $17,150).Visit anthonylawrence.com. 13 I spy boiserie doors not unlike the De Ricous’ (page 206). Confession: it’s trompe­ l’oeil Koziel paper (£170 approx).Visit koziel.fr. 14 Quick,leg it to John Derian for a Hercules’ foot ($825) by Astier de Villatte akin to the one in the hôtel near Paris.Visit johnderian.com. 15 Stuck for stucco panels like those chez De Ricou? Fake it with decorative artist Lucinda Oakes, whose trompe­l’oeils (from £8,500) are something else.Visit lucindaoakes.com. 16 Tubular belles: there’s still life – or even a still life – in Marcel Breuer’s ‘B9’ tables, so popular with painter Glyn Philpot (page 140) and atAram (£2,405). Ring 020 7557 7557, or visit aram.co.uk. 17 For more of Glyn Philpot’s Breuer furniture and his handsome sitters (page 140) see Simon Martin’s monograph (rrp £30).Visit pallant.org.uk $

d i a r yE X H I B I T I O N Cosmologies of colour, hidden Brazil, collectivism at Kassel, serious fun, plus Jennifer Higgie’s listings Left: Sedrick Chisom, Medusa Wandered the Wetlands of the Capital Citadel Undisturbed by Two Confederate Drifters Preoccupied by Poisonous Vapors that Stirred in the Night Air, 2021, mixed media. Opposite: Lina Iris Viktor, Eleventh, 2018, mixed media In the Black Fantastic HAYWARD GALLERY Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd, London SE1 THIS PAGE: © SEDRICK CHISOM. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PILAR CORRIAS, LONDON. PHOTO: MARK BLOWER. OPPOSITE: © LINA IRIS VIKTOR. COURTESY THE ARTIST In her 2013 book Afrofuturism: the World of Black Sci-Fi Fantasy and gy to technology and science. British sculptor Locke’s dramatic Fantasy Culture, film-maker and author Ytasha L. Womack writes installations recontextualise and also embellish archaic aristo- that ‘a cosmic foot has to be put down’ in terms of reimagining cratic figures, while Netherlands-based painter Ellen Gallagher’s the role and visibility of people of non-European descent. A tender watercolours employ mythology to envisage a different mainstream example is that of the 2018 sci-fi superhero film ending for the slave trade’s Middle Passage. Each artist has, in Black Panther, which imagined an African country that was un- their own way, played with time, physics and the unknown in touched by European colonialism. order to unearth new knowledge, truths and identities. Their heritages, practices and aesthetics differ, but they come together It’s not an isolated example. There’s a long tradition of ‘look- with the joint goal of Black liberation. ing forward’ in the work of artists, writers, architects, musicians and filmmakers of African descent. The author Octavia E. The show’s arrival is timely. This year’s US Black History Butler, the musician George Clinton and the artist Jean-Michel month witnessed new conversations about the need to focus on Basquiat, for instance, all explored African diaspora protago- the making of history, rather than simply observing it. Artistic nists and communities in various manifestations of speculative, expression appears to be at the centre of this change – especially fantastical and alternative realities. with organisers from the Black Lives Matter movement seeking to establish a ‘Black Futures Month’, which would entail 29 days British curator Ekow Eshun seeks to build upon these exist- spent creatively envisaging both individual and collective evolu- ing legacies with this new exhibition, In the Black Fantastic, which tion. This, too, appears to be the goal of In the Black Fantastic; to will focus on the creation of new worlds while also contemplat- provide fertile ground upon which new ways of visualising ing the issues of racism and social injustice, African mythology change will grow and flourish. and spiritual traditions. Another principle underpinning the exhibition is the idea The show will include painting, photography, sculpture, in- that Black people’s historical erasure shouldn’t mean that they stallations and mixed-media works by 11 international artists – have to humble themselves – they have the right to play god as Nick Cave, Sedrick Chisom, Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke, Wan much as anyone else. gechi Mutu, Rashaad Newsome, Chris Ofili, Tabita Rezaire, Cauleen Smith, Lina Iris Viktor and Kara Walker. Together, Eshun expressed it best in an interview about the pictures he they will explore Ekow’s ambitious vision of creating an immer- archives on an Instagram account that is dedicated to Afro- sive environment. No two narratives will be alike, but none of futurism. ‘They reveal a desire to make the world over, to create these artists is a stranger to the concept of the fantastical. imagery more fantastic, music more resonant, buildings more American sculptor Cave creates whimsical ‘soundsuits’ that cri- audacious, than ever previously witnessed.’ IN THE BLACK FANTASTIC tique racial injustice while Franco/Guyano/Danish Rezaire’s runs 29 June-18 Sept, Wed-Sat 11-7, Sun 10-6 $ KADISH MORRIS video-heavy practice marries African philosophy and cosmolo- is an arts journalist and critic based in Leeds and London

OPPOSITE: BALL GOWN: THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, BROOKLYN MUSEUM COSTUME COLLECTION AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, GIFT OF THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM, 2009; GIFT OF MRS WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST JR, 1966. PARLOUR: GIFT OF SIRIO D. MOLTENI AND RITA M. POOLER, 1965. PHOTOGRAPH: © DARIO CALMESE, 2021. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART. THIS PAGE: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST ELIZABETH COLOMBA

E X H I B I T I O d i a r yN Left: Thiago Rocha Pitta, Incêndio no Museu (Fire in the Museum), 2021, fresco, 1.5 × 1m THIS PAGE: COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MUSEU DE ARTE DE SAO PAULO. OPPOSITE: COURTESY BAAN NOORG COLLABORATIVE ARTS AND CULTURE AND DOCUMENTA 15. PHOTO: KRITTAPORN MAHAWEERARAT

Histórias Brasileiras Documenta 15 VARIOUS VENUES Kassel, Germany MASP SAO PAULO Brazil High on a hilltop, a Baroque statue of Hercules looks down on the German city of Kassel. Every five years, for 100 days, the city hosts Documenta, one In 1500, Pedro Alvares Cabral sighted land. Heading of the most important recurring international exhibitions of contempo- a force of around a thousand men, the Portuguese rary art – the epitome of a Herculean task. The exhibition normally at- captain had been sailing for over a month. A moun- tracts upwards of 900,000 visitors, drawn from all walks of life. Since its tain rose up on the horizon. As the ships drew clos- founding in 1955, each edition has had a new artistic director, whose vi- er, the golden shoreline and the thick green forest sion is examined with unforgiving ferocity. Vanguard cultural politics beyond came into view. ‘Such vastness of the enor- and the scrutiny of cultural horizons are expected of this mammoth exhi- mous treeline, with abundant foliage, that is incal- bition. Proposals explored in Kassel can influence the direction of con- culable’ wrote the colonial expedition’s scribe. Of temporary art for decades to come. course, the land wasn’t empty. As the ships dropped anchor, eight Tupinambá men walked down to the In a radical departure, at the helm of Documenta 15 is the Jakarta-based beach. The Portuguese met them; Cabral gave one a non-profit artist collective Ruangrupa. Its approach ‘is based on an alter- hat. The spot of this fateful exchange has become native, community-oriented model of sustainability in ecological, social the modern city of Porto Seguro in the Brazilian and economic terms, in which resources, ideas or knowledge are shared, state of Bahia. The prison and church built after the as well as social participation’. Many hands may make for light work but landing still stand – testaments to how the colonial- also for plenty of discussion. The umbrella concept for the exhibition is ists wrested control of this territory via law and reli- built on ‘the values and ideas of lumbung which directly translates as “rice gion. Nonetheless, despite the blood spilt and the barn”… a communal building in rural Indonesia where a community’s forests raised, as the historian Lilia Moritz Schwarcz harvest is gathered, stored and distributed according to jointly deter- notes in 2015’s Brazil: A Biography, a foundation mined criteria as a pooled resource for the future’. myth emerged that Cabral’s incursion was ‘a peaceful conquest, a communion of hearts united in religion’. True to the rhetoric, Ruangrupa has invited a diverse list of 54 artists, groups, collectives and activists from around the world. Differing opin- Schwarcz is one two lead curators on a new exhi- ions are guaranteed. Expanded notions of art embracing collectivity and bition at the Museum of Art of São Paulo, Histórias activism have been around at least since the 1970s, but arguably have not Brasileiras, exploring the stories, both myth and fact, been given centre stage in quite this way before. In a nod to the past, one of the country. It is the latest in a long line of diligently reforestation project in co-operation with HessenForst directly recalls researched survey exhibitions under the ‘histórias’ Joseph Beuys’s 1982 planting of some 7,000 oak trees for Documenta 7. banner. Previous iterations have included Histories Participants will include: Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt, a Cuban of Sexuality in 2017, Afro­Atlantic Histories in 2018 and group that once read and discussed Arendt’s book The Origins of Total­ Women’s Histories, Feminist Histories in 2019. In itarianism (1951) for 100 hours; Trampoline House from Copenhagen, Portuguese, ‘histórias’ has an ambiguous meaning, formed by artists, curators, refugee-rights advocates and asylum-seekers; encompassing stories both fictional and factual, and Fafswag, a Moana Oceanic arts collective founded in Aotearoa/New personal and political. In Histórias Brasileiras, art, Zealand that aims to ‘challenge the lack of representation of Queer and antiquities and ephemera from the 16th century to Indigenous people in the creative industries’. the present day create not a chronological portrait of the country, but something more speculative, in- One of the notable aspects of the list is the near-complete absence of corporating the myths, tales and cosmologies of art-world superstars whose works grace contemporary galleries, muse- groups oft forgotten from ‘official’ narratives. ums, institutions, fairs and auction houses around the world. Instead, groups such as Más Arte Más Acción from the Colombian rainforest will In the 19th century, photographic studios became create ‘spaces for thinking, conversations and encounters’. popular among monied Brazilians, almost all of Eur- opean ancestry, yet Histórias Brasileiras includes a Hercules was faced with 12 discrete labours, but Documenta 15 plans to rich archive of posed portraits of Black Brazilian task the very notion of art with addressing the urgent problems of our time women. The images demonstrate the ambiguity of – from social injustice, migration and marginalisation to climate change, history: the women present proudly, smartly dressed, sustainability and urban renewal. If just one thing can be agreed on, it’s in portraits of resilience. But they’re also the fruits of that issues now require new thinking and forms of collectivity. DOCUMENTA the slave trade: the shots were often commissioned 15 runs 18 June-25 Sept $ DOMINIC EICHLER is an arts writer based in Berlin by the ‘owners’ of the sitters as grim souvenirs of wealth and status. Other objects in the exhibition – Top: Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture, Skate to Milk: Baan Noorg to religious icons, trinkets of war and rebellion, and art of both European and indigenous tradition – nar- documenta fifteen, Nong Pho, 2022 rate the arrival of Spanish flu in 1918. Via news pho- tography, comic strips and caricatures, we see how this earlier pandemic placed the focus on the ine- qualities of colonialism, be it by geography, gender or race. Some stories never seem to change, yet hopefully the reason we tell tales of history has more to do with possible futures than with a certain past. HISTORIAS BRASILEIRAS runs 1 July-30 Oct $ OLIVER BASCIANO is a writer and critic based in São Paulo

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d i a r yE X H I B I T I O N Left: Lina Bo Bardi, Preliminary Study – Practicable Sculptures for the Belvedere at Museu de Arte Trianon, 1968, collage, China ink and watercolour on paper, 56.2 × 76.5cm Bottom: Assemble’s sketch model interpretation of the Animal Roundabout, inspired by a drawing by the architect Lina Bo Bardi, 2020 Assemble + Schools of Tomorrow NOTTINGHAM CONTEMPORARY Weekday Cross, Nottingham TOP: COLLECTION MUSEU DE ARTE DE SAO PAULO. COURTESY NOTTINGHAM CONTEMPORARY. BOTTOM: COURTESY ASSEMBLE Modernist architecture does not seem well suited to play. Its ma- led spaces. For this Nottingham exhibition, Assemble have filled terials – concrete, glass – are hard and unforgiving, its angles the galleries with their interpretation of two of Bo Bardi’s struc- sharp. It is underpinned by the rationalist logic of form follows tures: an enormous slide, which they have titled The Big Red, and a function; its preferred colour is white. So there is something menagerie-like floor vinyl, Animal Roundabout. A third play sculp- charming, even surreal about Lina Bo Bardi’s dreamy watercol- ture, titled The Fun House, has been devised through a series of our Preliminary Study – Practicable Sculptures for the Belvedere at workshops with children from three of the Schools of Tomorrow. Museu de Arte Trianon (1968), in which the Italian/Brazilian ar- chitect’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) – a suspended Art tends to give childhood metaphorical rather than physi- Modernist block of a building – is overshadowed by a series of cal space. Ever since the Romantics idealised it as a state of pure, monumental play structures. imaginative being, it has been a wellspring for cultural avant- gardes. Far less frequently is art (or its institutions) created with The latter were never built, but Bo Bardi’s drawing – with its actual children in mind: running, squealing, pushing, playing. suggestion that a space for play should be a fundamental part of This exhibition invites them to use the gallery free from its cus- every museum – is the jumping-off point for Assemble + Schools of tomary restrictions; in this instance, it’s the adults who have to Tomorrow at Nottingham Contemporary. The show is the culmi- think about what they should touch and where they can go. nation of a three-year collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary’s Schools for Tomorrow programme and the ar- ‘I would like to see children play there in the morning and chitecture and design collective Assemble, which places artists- afternoon sun,’ wrote Bo Bardi about MASP in 1967. She was in-residence in local schools to develop long-term creative interested in flattening hierarchies: her designs often combined strategies to support learning and growth. European Modernism with vernacular Brazilian elements; she created a Museum of Modern art in Bahia that exhibited the re- Assemble – surprise winners of the 2015 Turner Prize for a gion’s folk and craft objects (WoI May 2022), while her famous neighbourhood regeneration project in Liverpool – are serious display system for MASP reveals the backs of pictures. about play. In 2013-14, they worked with children to create an adventure playground in the east end of Her drawing was made at the height of Brazil’s military dicta- Glasgow based on the principle of freedom torship and there is something subversive about and exploration that informed the post- its invitation to gather. The sketch is dated war ‘junkyard playgrounds’ of bomb- 4/5/’68, just days before student marches shattered Europe. Their 2015 show in Paris unleashed events that shook The Brutalist Playground recast ele- the world with the political power of ments from three London housing youth. As an ethos for the adven- estates in foam, creating a spongy, ture playground, you need look moveable, literal deconstruction of no further than the protestors’ ral- an unwelcoming architectural style. lying call at the time: ‘Beneath the Since 2018, a subgroup, Assemble Play, paving stones, the beach!’ $ under the direction of playworker Penny Wilson, has been dedicated to creating children- ASSEMBLE + SCHOOLS OF TOMORROW: THE PLACE WE IMAGINE runs 7 May-4 Sep, Tue-Sat 10-6, Sun 11-5 $ AMY SHERLOCK



GRAPHIC SHIFT: LIKE IVY ON A WALL REINA SOFIA MADRID 18 1 d i a r yE X H I B I T I O N May-13 Oct A rich survey of the role of graphic art in vari- ous Latin American protest movements – spurred by 23 human rights, Indigenous, queer and feminist activists 1 Tubular belles – Heath Robinson, ‘The One- – from the 1960s to the present day. Curated by the piece Chromium-steel Dining-room Suite’, Southern Conceptualisms Network, ‘an international 1936, in Pinner. 2 Piping hot – Nancy Holt, platform for collective production and reflection’, in Sun Tunnels, 1973-76, in Sweden. 3 Gilt trip collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía, the exhibition – The Harley Golden Gospels, c800, at the showcases not only posters, banners and artworks but British Library, London. 4 Artistic in tent – the links, communities and collectives that emerged Cornelia Parker, War Room, 2015, at Tate from decades of artistic collaboration. Britain, London. 5 Red snapper – Luz Donoso, CORNELIA PARKER TATE BRITAIN LONDON 19 May-16 Oct She’s photograph from the series ‘Senãlamientos’, blown up a garden shed and suspended it from the ceil- 1979, in Madrid. 6 Lake eerie – Daniel Boyd, ing as if in mid-explosion; flattened a band’s brass in- 4 Untitled (TRISATSAG), 2020, in Sydney struments with the aid of a steamroller; displayed a spider that died in the Tower of London, a Georgian 6 teapot that survived being flung off the White Cliffs of 5 Dover and an embroidery of the Wikipedia entry on the Magna Carta. These are just a few examples of British artist Cornelia Parker’s reconfiguring of the everyday into something wondrous. Her solo exhibition at Tate Britain will survey a decades-long career – and will weave through the museum’s permanent collection. GOLD BRITISH LIBRARY LONDON 20 May-2 Oct A literally daz- zling exhibition that explores the symbolic and material use of this most prized of materials across five centuries, 20 countries and myriad religions via 50 of the British Library’s scrolls, illuminated manuscripts and gilded books. Most of the objects date from pre-1600, although some were created in the 17th to 19th centuries in South and Southeast Asia; the show also explores the use of the precious metal in 20th-century books. THE HUMOUR OF HEATH ROBINSON HEATH ROBINSON MUSEUM PINNER 21 May-4 Sept The 150th anniversary of the bril- liant British comic artist William Heath Robinson lands on 31 May. To mark the occasion, the eponymous mu- seum in Middlesex is exhibiting a chronological cross- section of his cartoons from 1905 to 1943. Along with the gentle satire he employed to counter German propagan- da in both world wars, the show will include drawings of the wonderfully convoluted contraptions and ingenious domestic designs that made him a household name – from ‘Bedroom Comfort’ and ‘The Folding Garden’ to ‘The One-piece Chromium-steel Dining-room Suite’. DANIEL BOYD: TREASURE ISLAND ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES SYDNEY 4 June-Jan 2023 This is the first major exhibi- tion devoted to this searingly inventive artist to be held in an Australian public institution. Featuring more than 80 paintings across two decades – in which Boyd re- shapes art history, his heritage as a Kudjla/Gangalu man from North Queensland, and archival images – the show will cast a light on the ways in which the artist has held a lens to colonial history, exploring Blackness as a form of political resistance. A richly illustrated publication ac- companies the show, with essays by First Nations authors. NANCY HOLT: INSIDE/OUTSIDE HOLT/SMITHSON FOUNDATION BILDMUSEET UMEA, SWEDEN 21 June-March 2023 Nancy Holt (1938-2014) channelled the power of the sun, the moon and the air in her quest to expand the possibilities of what art could be – and where it could bloom. The first European retrospective dedicated to the work of this pi- oneering American artist – an important member of the Earth, Land and conceptual art movements – will cover five decades of work, across concrete poetry, film, video, photography, drawings, installations, earthworks, art- ists’ books and public sculpture $

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o b j e c t l e s s o n A Ukrainian artist’s mutant cow channels Chernobyl, says Yevheniia Moliar Maria Prymachenko, Old grandfather grazing a cow near the fourth block, 1987, gouache on paper The artist Maria Prymachenko, who was born in 1909 in the small In 1986, as the Unit 4 reactor at Chernobyl nuclear plant COURTESY: MARIA PRYMACHENKO FAMILY FOUNDATION village of Bolotnya in north-central Ukraine, has often been po- melted down only 30km away, Prymachenko’s village was evac- sitioned as a naive, self-taught peasant woman with a fantastical uated. She refused to leave her home. She later recalled the liqui- imagination. Best known for her paintings of strange beasts and dators advising her and her son to put bags on their feet as the quirky floral arrangements, she was described in the Soviet media simplest protection against radiation pollution. She made a se- of the late 1930s as a ‘young collective farmer-artist from sunny ries of paintings commemorating the catastrophe. In one work, and happy Ukraine’. The realities she lived through, however, a one-eyed cow, mutated by radiation, wears such footwear, were anything but: the Holodomor, or Great Famine, of 1932-33; whose form remotely resembles the skulls of animals or hu- the atrocities of World War II; and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. mans. Bright oak branches frame the composition. Oak is a sa- Despite her folksy style and rural themes, Prymachenko’s works cred plant for many peoples: in Slavic culture, it symbolises the have never been as simple as the critics made out. Her paintings axis that connects the upper and lower worlds, where death refer to major geopolitical events of the day, including the space touches life, marking the centre of the universe. race; others are embedded in social issues, paying tribute to doc- tors and miners; in one work – Mr Reagan, Look at this picture and As with many of Prymachenko’s pictures, it is signed on the think how heavy and stupid this Atom is… (1986) – she even makes an reverse with a short, lyrical text, which reads: ‘As in Chernobyl appeal to the President of the USA. Far from being isolated from there was grief with the block/ And the old man grazed a cow the world in some imagined rural idyll, Prymachenko subtly there/ Wrapped his legs and horns and even his tail/ The cow eats felt, deeply understood and critically analysed modernity. the grass/ Listens to nothing.’ In a similar composition of 1987, the one-year-on, one-eyed cow eats grass beneath a pair of apple The artist grew up in Polissya, a sparsely populated region of trees heavy with ruby fruit. They look almost too red, toxically forests and swamps in the Pripyat river basin. She came from a beautiful. The cow still wears bags on his feet, horns and tail: the creative peasant family – her father was engaged in artistic wood- effects of the disaster, Prymachenko suggests, are far from over. working and her mother was an embroiderer. From childhood, she was immersed in the traditions and images of Ukrainian folk Today, these pictures have become newly relevant as the art. In the 1930s, she attended experimental workshops staged by threat of nuclear disaster intensifies. On 24 February, the Russian the Museum of Ukrainian Decorative Art in Kyiv, exhibiting in military began waging its brutal war against Ukraine; one of the First Republican Folk Art Exhibition in 1936. She studied at an the first areas to be captured was the Chernobyl nuclear power art school led by Vasyl Krychevsky, whose Art Nouveau designs plant, where waste from the accident is still stored. On 3 March, for the emblem of the interwar Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Russian army shelled the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant its currency drew on indigenous folk motifs, and was taught by – the largest functioning one of its kind in Europe. Both sites top academic artists, including the avant-garde Anatoly Petritsky have until recently been under the control of invading Russian and the Socialist Realist Vasyl Kasiyan. After graduating, she ex- forces. Since the war began, Prymachenko’s highly recognisable hibited in Moscow, Paris, Warsaw, Sofia, Montreal and Prague. images have circulated widely as symbols of Ukrainian culture. The original artworks, however, are less secure: on 28 February, Her early works of the 1930s and 1940s are small in size, with Russian troops destroyed a museum in Polissya that housed 25 images of fantastical anthropomorphic animals set against pale of Prymachenko’s paintings. Fierce fighting continues in the backgrounds. In the 1950s, she scaled up, creating large floral region; the fate of the artworks is unknown $ compositions with magnificent birds. And from the 1970s she Yevheniia Moliar is a Ukrainian art historian and critic. She specialises in began to make narrative paintings based in the traditional cul- the research and preservation of 20th-century cultural heritage in Ukraine, ture and local mythology of her native Polissya. and is involved in the project ‘The Museum Is Open for Renovation’

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