| Andrew Smaldone |
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| Statement: |
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| In my most recent series of paintings – all appropriated from drawings of stairwells by Georg Schaarwächter and his book Perspektive für Architekten (1964) – I have chosen to approach the relationship between inside-outside by not giving precedence to either the interior or the exterior in the painting itself. My interest in Schaarwächter’s renderings of stairs is three-fold: first, because I am attracted to their simplicity (the cast shadows created by an unseen bright sun and how this relates to the passing of time), second because they are didactic book drawings for architecture students and not concrete structures in the real world, and conversely because they have the potential to become actual stairs in any given city in the world regardless of culture-place-history. There is indeed something alarming about architecture when it has the potential to crop up in the same way everywhere. On the other hand, it is also frightening how contemporary world architecture stars promote themselves through the cult of the individual (in other words are we looking at the architecture or the person?). Needless to say, I am interested in modern and contemporary architecture’s contradictions – the highs and the lows and everything in between – and that is where Charlie Brown randomly comes in to the picture: a simple thought bubble of the importance of the ‘everyman’ at the center of the stage; a peculiar marriage, as it were, between Schultz and Schaarwächter. |
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Acknowledgments
and Academic Credits: |
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2005 MA Fine Art, Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London UK
2001 BA Fine Art, The George Washington University, Washington D.C. USA
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