Ian Kiaer

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present British artist Ian Kiaer’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, entitled health house.

Ian Kiaer is known for his multifaceted installations which revolve around certain histories of Western painting, 19th and early 20th century utopian architecture, modern literature, as well as ideological legacies of modernism, including the evolution of modern medicine. 

 For his exhibition at Chris Sharp Gallery, Kiaer will present a large cellophane inflatable sculpture, paintings, models and works on paper. These pieces operate very much as fragments, both in their conception and in the spatial relations they set up. The works approach the subject of Richard Neutra’s ‘health house’ (1929), designed for the LA based physician and naturopath Phillip Lovell. The building can be seen as a seminal modernist response to pioneering alternative health treatments that were in contemporary circulation. While hygiene and dust free surfaces were an appropriated medical trope of international modernism, water and sun cures were perhaps California’s addition to the clean air of Europe’s alpine sanitoriums, emerging at the end of the 19th century. 

Rather than a direct representation of the architecture, Kiaer has explored certain motifs through differing notions of abstraction, cropped images, painterly diagrams, plans and sections, scale models and previous works that find their reiteration within the play of the studio. For it is perhaps in the studio where the confidence of modernity and health are tentatively questioned— where stain, grime and the passing of time allow for human presence to be marked on the surface of things. It’s where the synthetic, natural, pristine, soiled—the machine and hand drawn, the measured, felt and sensed, all merge to find their register. Perhaps most of all it is where bodily frailty, weakness and sensitivity manifest most fully in attention.