You might think that Modernism and PoMo are mortal aesthetic enemies, but a presentation at Frieze Masters showed that the Cosmic House and Casa Luis Barragán share inspirational affinities. Are they, in fact, a match made in heaven…?
A house museum holds a particular kind of magic. Across the world, people make pilgrimages to not only witness the works an artist, architect or writer produced, but convene with the very space that served as their daily inspiration, and act as a microcosm for their creative ethos. And it must be said, who doesn’t love snooping around someone else’s home? If stepping across the threshold sheds some light on how a genius came into being (or indeed how someone’s covetable style can be aspired to), surely spending time among kitchen utensils and bathroom cabinetry is an act of historical excavation in and of itself.
This was the thinking behind the second iteration of ‘Reflections’ at this year’s Frieze Masters. Curated by Abby Bangser, it consisted of a group of galleries responding to a pair of houses that might seemingly be at odds, but actually shared a few common threads. This year the chosen couple were the Cosmic House in west London – that maximalist, Postmodern beast conceived by Charles and Maggie Keswick Jencks – and Luis Barragán’s home in Mexico City (WoI April 1983). Natural enemies, surely? Yet this all felt more like a collaboration than a contest.
Onward to Barragán’s side of the section, and the three galleries in question riffed on both the colour (though a few more pigment-drenched walls would have been welcome) and craft intrinsic to the architect’s vision. Tristan Hoare brought the exquisitely dyed weavings of Ptolemy Mann, alongside their collaborator, the Brazilian gallery Flexa, which showcased the paintings of Rubem Valentim. Borrowing from the iconography of the Candomblé, these motifs and icons could easily sit alongside the visual language of the Jencks, too.
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