The Brooklyn Rail

Encountering ‘T’ Space tucked in between the tall trees surrounding it is, on its own, an extraordinary architectural experience. It does not matter how you approach the building, whether you step down from the road or climb up from the side; each way of approximating the structure is impressive and unique. Depending on where you stand, the small gallery is below the ground, slightly hovering above it, or completely floating above your head. From its exterior condition alone, this is no traditional exhibition room. Upon entering the building, one encounters a symmetrical space shaped like a ‘T’ (hence the gallery’s name) following the archetypical plan of a Romanesque Basilica. The plywood walls lining its interior are usually painted white, attempting to hide the intricacies and richness of the design from the untrained eye. The strong architectural presence of the space designed by Steven Holl Architects is undeniable—a condition that is not only acknowledged but amplified by the current exhibition Painting / Sculpture by artists Peter Halley and Steph Gonzalez-Turner.

The exhibition presents the installation of a wall painting by Halley and a series of sculptures by Gonzalez-Turner. The former consists of fourteen colored planes that, in a contextual gesture, align to, mirror, or line architectural features of the building—like skylights, windows, and door openings—responding to and highlighting their presence in the gallery space. The latter, six plywood parquetry sculptures by Gonzalez-Turner, stand as towers statically inhabiting the space in an almost organic arrangement, finding the gallery’s corners and nooks and acknowledging its various heights.

Halley’s installation not only establishes a dialogue with the building through the simple coding of architectural elements. It does so at a disciplinary level, deploying multiple architectural references by selecting specific colors and highlighting the space’s materiality and composition. The overall arrangement of the colored planes in space, for example, reminds us of the placement of religious imagery inside Baroque churches, and their presence heightens our perception of the texture of the plywood walls in the same way early work by OMA/Koolhaas would emphasize the haptic qualities of cheap industrial materials. In this sense, this composition of planes does not attempt to be abstract but quite the opposite; it is a concrete action that alters our perception of space.

The chosen color palette for this installation departs significantly from what one would expect of Halley, who has made the use of Day-Glo paint a trademark of his work. Instead, the colors used in this installation reference the polychromatic interiors in the Bauhausian work of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. It is no coincidence that Halley chose pastel pink, seafoam green, powder blue, primary yellow, medium gray, and orange over his usual digital-inspired palette. This selection is, on the one hand, responding to the remote, natural setting of the gallery, away from the busyness of the city and the cultural associations to screens and technology that come with it. At the same time, it traces back a disciplinary lineage for the architecture of ‘T’ Space, tying it back to early modernism, its compositional values, and disciplinary ideals.

It is worth noting that when Gropius directed the famous architecture and design school in Dessau, he collaborated with the school’s own Wall Painting Workshop on various commissions during his tenure. Through these collaborations, this group of masters and students at the Bauhaus developed a formal language for wall painting, which Halley cites impeccably in this installation. These actions suggest that in his role as an educator, Halley wants us to recognize his installation’s historical background, going so far as to imply that the selection of color is, this time, not only perceptual but also indexical of a history that once tied architecture, painting, and sculpture under the same roof.

On the other hand, Gonzalez-Turner’s contribution can be interpreted within the curated context of the gallery as sculptural objects populating the space like permanent observers of Halley’s installation. The wall painting serves as a dialogical intermediary with the building, creating a backdrop, or as Halley calls it, “a theater” for the sculptures to perform in. This interpretation of Gonzalez-Turner’s pieces as “actors” is not fortuitous—as their predominantly vertical proportions and stepped profiles resemble abstracted human figures, and the variations in their scale, color, and pattern imbue them with unique personalities. Through this lens, it is inevitable to draw associations to the work of Giacometti or caryatids in classical architecture. Nonetheless, Gonzalez-Turner’s sculptures also establish a dialogue with contemporary cultural practices outside the gallery space and beyond the tradition of Western anthropomorphic sculpture.

At a distance, the six totems could easily be mistaken for architectural models—their patterns resemble a monotonous grid of windows that alludes to the Manhattanite office tower. Upon closer examination, these patterns are heterogeneous, composed by collaging different scales, colors, and pattern rotations onto a continuous textile-like surface. The graphic qualities of these textile texture maps remind us of the deadpan, generic architectural characters in Halley’s early work. The formal language of Casa Cézanne (1981) and Apartment House (1981) is redeployed in Gonzalez-Turner’s sculptures, now as a wrapper that forms itself around the three-dimensional plywood bodies. Halley’s flat, rigid facades are redefined in these sculptures as distorted and pliable fabrics.

On a material level, beyond their symbolic and representational relationship to architecture, Gonzalez-Turner’s sculptures deal directly with matters of construction. The poles presented in this exhibition are built through the tectonic aggregation of carefully cut and pasted multi-colored pieces of wood, a theme that the artist previously explored in Architrave (2018). This production method contradicts the reading of these objects as a smooth, continuous digital surface when perceived from afar, suggesting a departure from a post-digital epistemological framework and declaring an allegiance to craft and lo-fi practices.

Painting / Sculpture is not a traditional group show. The close interaction between Halley’s wall painting, Gonzalez-Turner’s pieces, and the building makes the exhibition feel like a collaborative work of art, complementing and heightening aspects of each other. The artist’s interventions in the building allow us to perceive the gallery’s space from an expanded cultural, historical, and aesthetic perspective. Overall, this exhibition is an essay on architecture—a response through painting and sculpture to the influence of the discipline of architecture as a cultural practice whose impact extends beyond the design and construction of buildings. Furthermore, this exhibition might be signaling a new chapter in Halley’s work, one beyond the two-dimensional plane that slips past sculpture and engages with space at an architectural level. Whether it is considered through a representational, indexical, or procedural lens, architectural ideas transcend disciplinary boundaries and thus may operate through diverse media types. This exhibition is an exquisite invitation to explore the possibilities of this condition in a refreshingly contemporary approach to painting, sculpture, and architecture.