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New York Grimm|Rosenfeld showed a spectacular site-specific installation by Felix Schramm in their booth at NADA in Miami. These two images document what he had done with one wall of the three walls [the projecting materials in the second image are much smaller than the wall seen in the first]. The gallery's current show in New York is devoted to this Düsseldorf-based artist. I haven't yet made it to West 25th Street, where Schramm has apparently transformed the entire space, including the floor and ceiling, but now it's a must.

As a huge fan of big chances taken by both these arts, I love it when art and architecture mix it up together. If we can't mate them with the tools available to us in the 20th century, we really should be ashamed of ourselves. New York please take note.

From the gallery press release:

Much of the formal inspiration for Schramm's work comes from public and institutional architecture. By breaking apart archetypal versions of these spaces, as well as the specific locations in which he creates his installations, Schramm exposes a multiplicity of tensions in experience: between architectonic shapes and the negative space created by them, between new, builder's-grade materials and the used and found materials that he sometimes employs, between construction and destruction, meditation and violence, the impulse to build and the inertia of gravity. Although his interventions are very carefully composed, the roughness of the materials, the jarring angles and the uncomfortable spatial incursions often seem to be the result of some terrible disaster, as if the room had opened up just long enough to accept some falling wreckage--only to close again.

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