Berggruen Gallery is proud to present Architecture in Art, a group exhibition featuring works by Lucy Williams, Tom McKinley, and Bruce Cohen.

This group exhibition surveys representations of architecture and interiors in contemporary art, highlighting the reciprocal influence between fine art and architecture. Hard, deliberate lines, careful considerations of perspective, and compositions of mathematical precision reign in these artworks, calling attention to the illicit impact of architecture on our lives and well-being.

From sweeping depictions of luxury homes to quiet still-lifes of flora sitting alongside a tranquil window, each artwork commemorates architecture as a means of defining, reconfiguring, or preserving the worlds in which we live.

Lucy Williams redefines the concept of collage through her intricate mixed media bas-reliefs depicting deserted scenes of mid-20th century Modernist architecture. Her works are a fine balance: structurally and in the tension between the precision and masculinity of the stark utopian architecture that is re-invested with humanity through the painstaking and traditionally feminine domain of craft. Ultimately, Williams’s primary interest lies in the interplay of representation that the Modernist source material so lends itself to in descriptions of geometric and modular blocks of material and color.

Born in Oxford in 1972, Williams studied at Glasgow School of Fine Art before obtaining a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at the Royal Academy in 2003. She has exhibited internationally with solo shows including Beneath a woolen sky and Pavilion, both at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2007 and 2012 respectively), Festival at McKee Gallery, New York (2014), and Lucy Williams: Pools at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2017). Group shows have included Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008), After curated by Marjolaine Levy at Galerie Mitterand, Paris (2013), and Cut & Paste | 400 Years of Collage, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019).

Tom McKinley was born in Bay City, Michigan, and educated in both Europe and the United States. Beginning at Goddard College in Vermont, he continued his education overseas in England at the Falmouth School of Art, the Ravensbourne College of Art, London, and Brighton Polytechnic. Currently, McKinley is living and working in the San Francisco area. Many of Tom McKinley's new paintings depict quiet, still, uninhabited spaces. Most of these spaces belong in the interior of someone's home yet they bear no trace of human contact or individuation.

An edge of a billiard table, a corner of a pool, a section of a veranda; these spaces are beautiful and unexpected architectural experiences. A rhythm of geometry, pattern, and repeating forms permeate these quiet settings. Light from peripheral windows breathes some life into these otherwise inanimate spaces. McKinley paints in a meticulously photorealist style which further heightens the surreal nature of these images.

Bruce Cohen is known for engaging his viewers with intriguing interiors in his distinctive, crisp, realist style. Influenced by Dutch still-life painting and Surrealism he orchestrates compositions that include fruit, books, vases, and flowers from his garden. These items are placed in geometric interiors devoid of human beings but haunted by a human presence. Bruce Cohen, a native Southern Californian, graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cohen is represented in public and private collections such as Phillip Morris, New York, Pacific Bell, Los Angeles, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.