Monika Sosnowska’s Tower on view at Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth will present Monika Sosnowska’s Tower, a sculpture alluding to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s structures and the International Style, next month in NYC,

Polish-born Sosnowska is known for her large scale, site-specific sculptures and installations, often creating charged work rooted in existing structures and influenced by the built environment. Collapsing, twisting forms not only alter the viewer’s perception of physical space, but also suggest a place where “architectural space begins to take on the characteristics of mental space.” Her works manifest recollections, both individual and collective, and challenge the viewer’s certainty of memory and societal structures.

Measuring approximately 110 feet (34 metres) in length, Tower takes on the International Style of 20th century architecture, specifically the design principles of German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Tower references the steel framework underlying the glass façade of the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago, one of Mies van der Rohe’s masterpieces. Instead of its rational, ordered geometry, Sosnowska has disfigured and abstracted the structure into a fallen monument, twisting and curving across the vast gallery space. What was once a cool, elegant, and perfectly readable structure is reimagined by Sosnowska as the complete opposite, rendering the modernist ideology of perfect structural engineering into a lyrical, sculptural object.

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Photograph: Juliusz Sokolowski

by Louise Lui

Tower will be on view from September 5 until October 25, at Hauser & Wirth’s New York City downtown gallery at 511 West 18th Street.