Building Blocks: Contemporary Works from the Collection

Architecture engages with space, planes, surface, and volume, and artists have strived to depict these spatial characteristics realistically since as early as the Renaissance. In recent decades a wide range of artists have created works that represent or borrow from architecture through sculpture, painting, photography, prints, video, and collage. This exhibition features work in varying scales, which illuminates the relationship between the human body and architecture. Whereas buildings function within the larger context of the built environment, all of the works in Building Blocks are experienced in relation to the constructed interior space of the museum gallery. Whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional, abstract or representational, interior or exterior, they heighten our perception of the structural functionality and visual components of architectural space. The show includes work by Kate Blacklock, Brian Chippendale, Buckminster Fuller, Andrew Grassie, Sol LeWitt, Christian Marclay, Ron Nagle, Jan Schoonhoven, Mimi Smith, Shirley Tse, Lucy Williams, B. Wurtz, and Arnie Zimmerman, among others.