Behind the hang the lend lease / architects’ journal awards 16
Chris Wilkinson explains how he and co-curator Eva Jiricna approached this year’s hang
Visitors to this year’s Royal Academy Summer Show will encounter an imposing addition to Burlington House’s Annenberg Courtyard. Chris Wilkinson’s installation, From Landscape to Portrait is a series of 11 cross-ply laminated timbers, atop a polished stainless- steel plinth, whose tilted angle follow the transition described in the work’s title. Te frame’s golden section picks up the proportions of the Palladian fenestration adjacent, and ends on axis with the galleries’ main entrance. Inside is Wilkinson and fellow Royal Academician Eva Jiricna’s first joint Architecture Room hang. From the boardroom of his Clerkenwell office – while fellow curator Jiricna jets across Europe – he explains how the duo curated this year’s show. ‘Te idea of the Summer Show is that it’s a great
opportunity for students and emerging architects to show alongside established architects, which is quite an unusual situation and it pleases a lot of people,’ says Wilkinson. ‘Painters dominate the list of RAs, and there are only 16 architects, who are each required to submit at least one work per year. Despite that, there were a lot of exhibits to work with.’ Te Royal Academy’s classical proportions, its height and the volume of work lends itself to stacking the
work, in the Victorian style of hang, rather than opting for a White Cube approach with each exhibit given its own generous spacing. ‘Once you accept that, then it’s a matter of making it all work,’ says Wilkinson. ‘We tried to hang as much work as we could. We
tried to have all the models in the run of plinths on either side of the central axis so we could leave walls for hanging – which is more consistent with other rooms.’ ‘We start each wall on the ground. It was largely visual – finding things that work together – but there was a little more to it than that. We grouped big names – Eric Parry, Ian Ritchie, Norman Foster and work by the Turner Prize-winning sculptor Richard Deacon – on the back wall, with David Chipperfield’s photographs at the top. Tese are very strong pieces and can work high up. We put three Peter Cook pieces above Zaha Hadid’s work, which feels nice because it expresses something of her lineage. What tied these all together, in the middle of the wall and on axis with the main entrance, was an excellent planar sculpture by Rana Begum, which we all thought was very strong.’ Like Deacon’s faience study, a collaboration with Eric
Parry, Begum’s sculpture, which would traditionally belong in the sculpture room, is a product of some
Eva Jiricna and Chris Wilkinson in this year’s Architecture Room (photo by Richard Nicholson)
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