Artist:
Ângela Ferreira (born 1958, Maputo, Mozambique; lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal).

Materials:
Steel, wood, acrylic.

Description:
“Ângela Ferreira’s Crown Hall/Dragon House, 2009 literally turns Mies on his head by conflating elements of those two buildings into an upside down structure that connects floor to ceiling. It is an interesting object because it appears to be something utilitarian and straightforward like a piece of furniture or equipment, but is really just a strange sculpture. Half architectural model and half artwork, it also interfaces with a type of modernism mostly left out of the show: the piece ties in the aesthetics of artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. More pointedly it links up with the work of Liam Gillick and Jorge Pardo, not just stylistically, but in the way their objects too flirt with traditional fine art object-making and applied modernism.”
—Eric Wenzel, “God and Man Don’t Believe in Modern Love,” Artslant.org, December 7, 2009.

“For other artists, modernist landmarks are lenses for regarding overlooked histories. In the sculpture Crown Hall/Dragon House (2009), Ângela Ferreira suspends a tall, spectral steel skeleton of Mies’s masterpiece over an abstracted rendering of a building in Mozambique by the eccentric architect Pancho Guedes.”
—Susan Tallman, “Bauhaus Curriculum,” Art in America, December 1, 2009.