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For MvdR (2008)

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was commissioned by the curators of the prestigious 5th Berlin Biennal, to create a site-specific installation for the Neue Nationalgalerie. This large-scale installation titled ‘For MvdR,’ (Mies van der Rohe was the architect of the museum) was a response to the architect’s complex aestheticisation of materiality, form and function. In this respect the installation was staged as a ‘material’ intervention into this architectural and political context. Consisting of eight large-format panels (2.8 meters high) leant against the massive marble cladding of the famous building and covered in colourful patterns they resembled fragments of a wallpapered wall, or casually leant paintings. In fact, the works were marble slabs (the decoration depicted in acrylic paint) and as such set up a dialogue between the ‘authentic’ (natural) but decorative surfaces of the buildings interior and Nineteenth and Twentieth Century traditions in the decorative arts which Modernist ideology sought to downgrade. The installation presented a juxtaposition of artifice and function, and hierarchies of high and low culture – for instance, Chaimowicz’s psychedelically motivated ornamented surfaces developed as freely associating pattern repeats; operating as a tongue-in-cheek imitation of the marble’s grain. As such Chaimowicz’s research investigates the same themes – colour, pattern, and proportion – as Mies van der Rohe, but transforms them into autonomous decoration. This exhibition was cited in Chaimowicz’s award of the Paul Hamlyn: Award for Artists in 2012 http://www.phf.org.uk/artists/artist.asp?id=556