NYAB Event - Tobias Putrih "After Frei Otto"

Tobias Putrih "After Frei Otto"

Ludlow 38 / The Goethe-Institut New York

This event has ended.

Ludlow 38 presents Tobias Putrih: After Frei Otto, an exhibition of new work by Putrih inspired by the work of German architect Frei Otto (*1925 in Dessau, Germany).

Putrih’s newly commissioned installation is accompanied by a presentation of a complete set of 40 publications (1969 -1995) produced by the Institute for Lightweight Structures at the University of Stuttgart (founded by Otto in 1964) and video footage documenting the epochal work of the architect.

In the front gallery at Ludlow 38, the Slovenian artist has developed a new installation influenced by the early soap bubble experiments of Otto. Between a group of fixed points, soap film spreads automatically into the smallest achievable surface area. These experiments have helped Otto to design buildings with a fraction of materials used in other construction projects and made him one of the most important representatives of experimental architecture. Putrih adopts the experiments with an interest in their surprising effect and experimental nature, relating them to a history of architecture pedagogy.

Otto began to practice as an architect in 1952 and completed his first construction in parallel to Arnold Bode’s Documenta 1, a music pavilion for the garden show in Kassel (1955). He became known as an authority on lightweight tensile and membrane super-light tent structures and collaborated a.o. on the design of the German Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo and the roofs of the Olympic Stadium in Munich (1972). The Institute for Lightweight Structures at the University of Stuttgart (IL) exists until today as ILEK, directed by Werner Sobek.

Tobias Putrih (*1972 in Kranj) lives and works in Cambridge, Mass. and New York. Recent solo shows include MIT List Visual Art center, Cambridge, Mass. (with MOS architects), BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, as well as Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (all 2009) and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010)