The catalog for Goshka Macuga’s recent exhibition at Milan’s Fondazione Prada is a masterpiece of diagramming and tabulation that details the web of connections between cultural moments and figures. Now, at Andrew Kreps Gallery, the London artist pursues her fascination with patterns of knowledge by giving physical form to the links between important thinkers. Sparked by research into the utopian-sounding International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, a United Nations think tank founded in the 1920s, a set of large sculptures employs bronze rods to join together colorful busts of the intellectuals in question.
This visual-material approach to pondering the mutation of ideas is decidedly literal, but how better to explore a complex idea than by starting simple? There’s a game-like appeal to these structures—which resemble enlarged models of molecules—that sets thought in motion without making it feel like homework.
Another piece, made in collaboration with artist and researcher Patrick Tresset, is harder to crack. At once high tech and loose-knit, the object consists of an extended metal table wrapped by a long paper scroll covered in sketches. These turn out to have been rendered with robotic technology, suggesting some attempt to formulate a history of systems in art. Even so, the work transcends its cerebral premise with an ambiguous, investigatory feel that gives it an all-too-human resonance.