Exhibition: Do you remember how perfect everything was?

The Architectural Association hosts the first retrospective exhibition of the works of Zoe Zenghelis. As a two-part exhibition, held in collaboration with Betts Project, the two venues jointly present and review Zenghelis’ early paintings from the 1960s, her years at OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), through to recent works made in 2020. Stretched between abstract metropolitan tectonics and landscape structures, the exhibition represents an enquiry into absent architectural projects.

Zoe Zenghelis’ paintings are inspired by metropolitan structure, landform, and abstract tectonics.

Yet the imagery is quintessentially modern and modernist: it is an imagery of the fragment, the collage, the assemblage, the parts standing for the whole, and often greater than the whole. Her particular colour palettes, abstract planes, and jagged forms, locate her quite comfortably within the lineage of modernist painters, who challenge the conventional aesthetic rules and incite a search for a paranoid-critical rationality. At the same time, Zenghelis’s works have been influenced and developed within the context of the mid-20th century contemporary art in London, when, beyond the aesthetics of common sense, the post-war British modernist painters abandoned any grand narratives and refused to serve institutional social or political projects; they chose to be ‘sole coherent units’ as Frank Auerbach once claimed.