For his first solo exhibition, Pablo Bronstein unites architectural extremes, synthesizing historic styles from the vernacular architecture of the 1980s to those of the internationalist eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The main space features an intervention in the gallery wall—Doorway in the Style of James Stirling, 2006—that exposes the girders and makes a tall portico reminiscent of a frou-frou pseudo-classicist architecture of the early ’80s. Accompanying this work is a series of drawings that play with a range of architectural methods and concerns, from the proposal sketch to the Romantic vista. For instance, the drawing Neoclassical Building with New Facade in the Style of Michael Graves, 2006, depicts an ancient Greek temple in two panels set between found wooden frames while another piece, Idealised Perspective in the Style of Juvarra & Michael Graves, 2005, alludes to baroque architecture’s dynamic and theatrical perspectives, which were later integrated into Graves’s influential postmodern American architecture. Reevaluating architectural typologies and their distinctive design, Bronstein—who received his master’s from Goldsmiths College last year—highlights architecture’s transhistorical despotic tendencies. Claiming freedom from this tradition, his drawings combine ’80s design with Neoclassicism in a game of historical juxtaposition, comparison, and quotation.
