{"id":892257,"date":"2026-09-15T00:14:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T00:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/892257\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T00:14:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T00:14:19","slug":"madelon-vriesendorps-subconscious-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/892257\/","title":{"rendered":"Madelon Vriesendorp\u2019s Subconscious Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tArt Review<\/a><\/p>\n

An exhibition explores the creativity and imagination of an artist whose way of seeing influences architects and artists. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Natalie
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Madelon
\n Madelon Vriesendorp, \u201cFreud Unlimited,\u201d (1975) (all photos Natalie Weis\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2014\u00a0The British architect Sir John Soane and the Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp were born nearly two centuries apart, but despite differences in history, culture, technology, nationality, and gender, they share an undeniable kinship \u2014 a deep engagement with architecture, an affinity for collecting, and a penchant for mischief. The current exhibition at Sir John Soane\u2019s Museum, Madelon Vriesendorp: Mind Games<\/a>, brings together more than 50 works from across the artist\u2019s career, celebrating shared connections while offering a quietly playful rebuke to its host\u2019s neoclassical sensibility.<\/p>\n

A significant portion of the exhibition centers around Vriesendorp\u2019s best-known work, \u201cFlagrant D\u00e9lit\u201d (1975), a delightfully surreal anthropomorphism of two iconic Manhattan skyscrapers caught in a post-coital moment by a spotlight atop the RCA Building<\/a>. A few years later, Vriesendorp\u2019s then-husband, architect Rem Koolhaas, chose the painting as the cover image for his Delirious New York<\/a> (1978) \u2014 which he called, in the subtitle, a \u201cretroactive manifesto\u201d \u2014 helping secure its place in the iconography of the contemporary urban imagination. In fact, \u201cFlagrant D\u00e9lit\u201d belongs to a larger series of paintings exploring the psychological and sexual aspects of contemporary architecture, several of which are on view, along with a 2026 cover commissioned by the New York Review of Architecture, testifying to the work\u2019s ongoing influence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Madelon Vriesendorp, \u201cFlagrant D\u00e9lit\u201d (1975)<\/p>\n

Drawings of Soane\u2019s own projects, along with architectural drawings by his teacher George Dance, are on display in adjacent rooms. When Soane was awarded a travel stipend as an architectural student at the Royal Academy in 1778, it was still custom for upper-class British men to embark on a Grand Tour of Europe. Soane was no exception, and the many drawings, paintings, sculptures, and antiquities he brought back from two years of travel through Italy formed the beginnings of his house-and-office-turned-museum.<\/p>\n

Vriesendorp and Koolhaas moved to New York in 1972, first to Ithaca and then to New York City, where the artist \u201cdiscovered bad taste in a big way<\/a>\u201d and began to collect objects seriously. Compared with Soane\u2019s collection, Vriesendorp’s is decidedly more diverse and proletarian, shaped by the dizzying compilation of styles she encountered in the United States, encompassing small toys, figurines, models, postcards, and sundry quotidian objects. Mind Games includes a handful of postcards with an architectural focus; however, her full collection, which numbers in the thousands, includes such unexpected categories as Luna Parks<\/a>, lighthouses, bus terminals, penitentiaries, airplanes, disasters, and babies \u2014 or, as she saw it, simply \u201cAmericana.\u201d Soane\u2019s neoclassical reverence is replaced with a postmodern embrace of the banal, the camp, and the kitsch; the Enlightenment regard for knowledge is traded for a critical examination of the dominant culture.<\/p>\n

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Already have an account? Sign in<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Review An exhibition explores the creativity and imagination of an artist whose way of seeing influences architects…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":892258,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-892257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/892258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}