Art World
Imagining the Artist-Architect Collabos That Never Were
What if Giorgio de Chirico and Tadao Ando had worked together?
Christie Chu
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With the distinctions between art and architecture getting blurrier, with artists like Ai Weiwei designing huge buildings while architects like Frank Gehry and Santiago Calatrava having museum exhibitions, Italian illustrator Federico Babina opted to the trend to its logical conclusion. He has married the two practices in his new series “Artistect.” Babina sketches his interpretation of what he thinks a collaborative effort would look like between famous artists like Sol LeWitt or Wassily Kandinsky, and starchitects like the Dutchman Rem Koolhaas or the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright.
“The project’s main idea is to reinterpret famous paintings using a brush soaked in architectural tints,” Babina explains in his artist’s statement. The series of 25 images includes depictions of Pablo Picasso‘s Guernica fused with Le Corbusier’s starkly geometric ideas about urbanism, Keith Haring‘s playful lines and bright palette with Neutelings Riedijk’s equally playful and socially aware structures, Salvador Dalí‘s surreal landscape filled with Jan Kaplický‘s neo-futuristic buildings, and Christo’s fabrics used as drapery in Shigeru Ban‘s most famous residential design.
Babina has also used his stylized illustrations in a number of other series including “Archist,” where he creates fictional buildings constructed by artists such as Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, and James Turrell. In “Archimachine,” he envisions what a country’s buildings and inhabitants would look like as stylized factories. Babina’s clever illustrations shows us new ways of looking at these artists’ and architects’ signature styles.
[h/t Hyperallergic, Designboom]
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