September 14 - November 11, 2020

For his solo project with the gallery Terence Gower organizes the formal vocabulary of Tel Aviv’s “Bauhaus Style” architecture into an alphabet. Gower sees the letters of this alphabet as the building blocks for a new language that was used to write the new city as well as engineer the new society taking root in the desert of Palestine in the 1920s and 30s.

Can buildings tell stories, communicate ideas? Much of Gower’s oeuvre has focused on this question. He is particularly interested in how buildings represent the aspirations of the people and governments that commission them, and of the architects who design them. Gower has focused on modern architecture, interested in how its abstract vocabulary—simple, solid geometry—has come to stand for so much.

A few examples: In Gower's ongoing embassy series, he examines how the US State Department’s Cold War construction program used modern architecture to represent the US as “an open, dynamic and cooperative modern country." A 2008 commission from the Hirshhorn Museum was an investigation of Joseph Hirshhorn’s plan to build a new city in the wilderness of Ontario, Canada. The centerpiece of Hirshhorn’s plan was a “modern highrise in the forest” representing nature dominated by technological modernism. And his long-term research project on post-revolutionary architecture in Mexico has resulted in many projects that trace the official adoption—by Mexico’s government and its elites—of the design philosophy of the pre-war European avant-gardes. Funcionalismo as a signifier of the new society.

All of these projects are echoed in this current project “Bauhaus Style,” an extension of the idea of architectural representation into a metaphorical game of language and syntax. To Gower, the pre-war architecture of Tel Aviv—the famous Bauhaus Style—can be read like a text. The forms you see repeated in these buildings, the white cubes, the curved balconies, the pilotis, form a vocabulary that the city’s early architects used to spell out a message that is still legible after all these years: “This is a city founded on a new set of principles.” The artist’s installation at Marisa Newman Projects consists of a 12-foot wall hydrocal sculpture made up of cast architectural details and a series of gouache and pen drawings.

The Tel Aviv Studies drawings depict four typical buildings of the city in axonometric form, each composed of a series of standard blocks. The blocks combine into solid geometric forms that represent the more common features of the Tel Aviv building vocabulary: curved corners, strip windows, finely detailed overhangs, rounded balconies, etc. These ink-on-velum drawings are laid over gouache-on-paper polygons, their shapes derived from the unusual city lots generated by the 1925 Geddes plan.

Terence Gower has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship, Canada Council Long Term Grant; NYSCA Architecture, Planning & Design Project Award, Graham Foundation Fellowship, Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, Peter Norton Family Foundation Grant, World Views Studios Residency (WTC, New York), Cité des Arts Fellowship (Paris), Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship (Genoa), and a fellowship to the Residencia Internacional de Artistas en Argentina (Buenos Aires). His works are included in the following collections: National Gallery of Canada, Museo de Art Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museu de Arte do Rio, Brazil, Region Rhône-Alpes, Colección Jumex, Peter Norton Collection, Colección Juan Yarur, Queens Museum, University of Rochester, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, New York City Department of Education, and many private collections.

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Installation images: Marcie Revins