The Guggenheim New York is a series of mechanically produced sculptures. A machine takes models of canonical building and dips these into paint, over and over again. On one hand, I am interested in how the process of additive subtraction --- the layering of paint, over a highly described form --- archives the decay of form while leading to a new formal language. On the other hand, I am searching for the moment when an object changes its medium condition – the point when architecture becomes art. At the same time, all of these works problematize the issue of scale. As models, the pieces exist on a 1:200 scale. Yet as objects, they also exist in a 1:1 scale; the material properties of the paint together with the physical resistance of gravity, room temperature and humidity etc. make the process un-scalable bound to the 1:1. The pieces thus collapse from being distinctly in the realm of architecture and art into a mutual medium condition - a 1:200 : 1:1 scale that superimposes the representational with the actual object nature within one thing.

dimensions: each ~ 6" x 3.75" x 4"

While Still Before Us After All places Kai Franz’s art in conversation with the architecture of List Art Building, designed by iconic American modernist Philip Johnson. New sculptures included here were conceived in response to the grids of concrete, stone, and wood in the List Art lobby. The sculptures are reminiscent of the texture and tone of Brutalist concrete architecture, yet the variability and dynamics of their forms appear organic and expressive.

Franz’s sculptures play with how architecture produces form and architecture’s relationship to matter and materiality in the digital age. Beginning as drawings created with computer-aided-design (CAD) software, Franz’s sculptures are fabricated through the artist’s custom computer-aided-manufacturing (CAM) process. A modified architectural plotting machine first deposits sand, then it drops resin onto the landscape of sand, building the sculptures layer by layer. While akin to 3D printing, Franz’s technique surrenders the control implied in the CAD and CAM processes to embrace the fluidity and unpredictability of the materials as the resin seeps through the sand along the path of least resistance.

The exhibition features new and recent sculptures by Franz including his first large-scale sculptural work. Accompanying the sculptures, the video work The Particles Fell Silent presents animations of Franz’s CAD drawings subjected to artificial forces and dynamics. A dialogue unfolds between two particles in the drawings, revealing a playfulness at the heart of Franz’s compositions. More than static, fixed forms, the sculptures are moments in the lives of architectural drawings that ponder possibilities beyond the grid.


– Ian Alden Russel, Curator