Zoe Zenghelis: Fields, Fragments, Fictions was open at the Carnegie Museum of Art from March 26 to July 24, 2022.
Contrary to popular belief, Zoe Zenghelis, cofounding partner of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), is no architect. She has never been an architect. During a moderated conversation to mark the opening of Fields, Fragments, Fictions, the retrospective exhibition of her work currently on view at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Zenghelis took the opportunity to correct the record. “I’m getting a bit upset about people confusing me with an architect,” she said. “I am not an architect—I am a painter.”
The confusion is understandable. The greater part of the current show comprises paintings that Zenghelis (born 1937, in Athens) made during her years collaborating with the earliest incarnations of OMA, roughly 1972 to 1985. The firm was officially founded in ’75, but even then it was just a team of four, two couples—one Dutch, Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp, the other Greek, Elia Zenghelis and Zoe Zenghelis—working out of their rented London flats. Koolhaas and Vriesendorp had the larger apartment, so it was there that the group typically convened. Zaha Hadid, Koolhaas and Elia’s student at the Architectural Association (AA), entered the picture, stormily, somewhat later. “In the kitchen, Elia and Zaha and Rem would have crazy fights,” Zenghelis recalled.
More than a decade of intense collaboration yielded remarkable projects that have become milestones of postmodern architecture: Hotel Sphinx, New Welfare Island, Parc de la Villette, the Irish Prime Minister’s Residence—the list goes on. That period altered the trajectory of each protagonist: Zaha soon set off on her own, using paint to build a new universe one brushstroke at a time. Madelon and Zoe became friends who regularly traded notes on one another’s work, and the pair subsequently led the Color Workshop at the AA. Koolhaas published Delirious New York in 1978 to great acclaim; the book was illustrated by many of the projects he made with his collaborators. These episodes are well known to history, though this exhibition does offer an evermore personal, firsthand account. But the unique contribution of the show is its presentation of Zoe Zenghelis-as-painter. The evolution of her practice, from delineator to color theorist, is the arc that holds this prodigious exhibition together.
The show’s organizers, Theodossis Issaias and Hamed Khosravi, have pulled off nothing short of a miracle. The checklist is formidable. It is a gathering of the finest work in Zenghelis’s oeuvre, unlikely to ever be reconvened. The catalog texts are illuminating and precise. The installation is an elegant and effective response to a difficult venue. The Belgian linen–lined halls of the Carnegie Museum’s Heinz Architectural Center—setting of Fields, Fragments, Fictions—are a far cry from the white cube galleries that would seem more natural complements to Zenghelis’s abstract works. As a solution, white walls were purpose-built within the galleries wherever works in Zenghelis’s own hand are displayed; the result is an architectural collage that enlivens the space.
The center, which was established in 1990 through the largesse of Drue Heinz, philanthropist and publisher of The Paris Review, is a historicist confection uncomfortably lodged within a spartan building by American modern architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. That structure, too, is itself an extension to the Carnegie Museum complex in Oakland, a gargantuan Beaux-Arts behemoth put up at the end of the nineteenth century by the industrialist and infamous union buster Andrew Carnegie. It’s one more reason why the show works so well: it’s a surprising combination—this work in that space—like the Surreal result of cadavres exquis.
That it is impossible to disjoin Zenghelis’s painting from architecture is a conundrum that ricochets throughout the exhibition. Some of her explicitly architectural compositions, such as Site Plan for 16 Villas on the Island of Antiparos, Greece (1983), show color at work in real space, using hues to produce subtle compositional rhythms. Inversely, some of the more abstract pictures, such as Shapes in Space (1992), exploit the alchemy of painted space, using tone to transmute shadows into weighty, tectonic forms. The most exciting pieces operate somewhere between those two extremes. One such highlight, Cassata, after Parc de la Villette (1983), recasts OMA’s famous competition entry as a Sicilian sponge cake decorated with frosting piped on in pastel-colored stripes and topped with a light dusting of Constructivist sprinkles. The Parc looks good enough to eat.
If this exhibition had a mascot it would be Happiness, an oil painting that Zenghelis completed in 2000: it features prominently in the show, it is reproduced on the cover of the catalog, and it is reprinted on the overleaf. The work contains echoes of the formative relationships and influences that Zenghelis gained early in her career, but combines those elements into a whole that is uniquely her own. Rays of color rush diagonally from top-left to bottom-right, recalling both the prismatic geology of Zaha Hadid’s epic paintings for The Peak, Hong Kong (1982–3) and the parallel grain of OMA’s Parc de la Villette. But there is no architectural space to which this picture corresponds. Quite removed from any representational function, this is painting for painting’s sake. It is Zoe Zenghelis finding delight—happiness, after all—in delicacies of color.