Ian Kiaer

February 17April 22, 2012

Directors Foreword
Long has there waged a dialogue surrounding what is art?
Like many criticisms the idea is posed as a question. There is
additionally some implication that there is a standard by which
to make this evaluation. Traditionally I have come down on the
side of artist intention: that is, if the person who made the object
claims it as art, then so be it.
The application of this methodology inherently provides for a
subsequent ascription of a value judgmentit is art, but is it
good art? It begs the question, What art is worthy of our time,
attention, concern, and investment (psychological, spiritual,
financial, or otherwise)?
For me the best art teaches us (the viewer) something about
lifeculture, ourselves, and societywithout knowing that the
teaching is happening or has happened. The best art allows us
to look, learn, and be in a seamless fashion.
Ian Kiaers work was put to this test for me in Venice this
summer as I took a few friends who happen to be contemporary
art collectors to see his installation at Fondazione Querini
Stampalia. Kiaers work is decidedly obtuse, at least upon an
initial encounter, and not surprisingly they all looked to me for
an explanation of what we were seeing.
Kiaer often works from a very specific topical (usually historic)
subject mater and filters narratives, circumstances, and facts
into personal physical expressions. While I was not aware of
this source for his Venice project, I led my friends through what
I saw installed, verbalizing my visual impressions and making
observations and connections along the way. My willingness
to do so seemed to empower them to do the same. When we
left we noticed a text panel hanging outside the room that we
had missed upon our entry. The text confirmed what we had
collectively learned. The experience reinforced one of the things
I value most about artit not only allows us but encourages us
to trust ourselves and what we see and know.
The truism that life is what we make of it may be clich, but it
also applies to art. We all know what we know, but it is through
art that we may come to know it a bit differently.
Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson
CEO and Director, Chief Curator

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Models and Fragments: Ian Kiaers Studio

On a rainy day just after the turn of the new year I visited Ian
Kiaer in his studio, which is on an upper floor of what used to
be part of a nunnery close to the ancient Church of St Mary le
Bow at Cheapside in the East End of London. The studio is quite
large, containing a table with books and wrapped parts of works
stacked against a wall. The peeling paint of the ceiling seemed
appropriate to the materials marked with traces of their past life
that Kiaer favors. The room has the feeling of being a place of
contemplation and study as much as of making. While the idea
of the studio as a privileged locus for the mysterious process
of artistic creation has been criticized, and indeed since the
1960s abandoned by many artists for the sake of social practice
in the everyday world, for Kiaer the studio remains a place of
disclosure, where objects and materials resonate with each
other and provoke thinking.
For all the research that goes into his work, Kiaers method is
simple and straightforward. He finds things and materials and
brings them to the studio, where they may or may not be altered.
Often the alteration turns an object or bit of material into what
could be called a painting or a sculpture. In addition he makes
small models and has elements of his work, such as what he
terms an inflatable, fabricated. In the studio, Kiaer explores
relations between these things, moving back and forth to make
an adjustment, sometimes a very tiny one. The process will be
repeated when the elements are moved to the gallery, where the
configuration of the space will present a different opportunity.
So a work may go through a number of variations, just like a
piece of music.
Kiaers Melnikov Project is about the role of the studio as a
place where things are subject to a particular kind of attention
and take on new valences in relation to each other, thanks to
the artists alterations or simply by being there. The studio as
it has come to us involves the merging of the workshop, as a
place of making where skills and conventions are exercised,
and the studiolo, dating from the fifteenth century, as a place
of withdrawal, an inner room where the duke or prince went
to read, think, and write away from the hubbub of his public
duties. Workshop and studiolo meet in the modern artists
studio when subjective experience comes to be understood as
the source of authenticity.1
The avant-garde idea that artists should leave the studio in
order to transform the world originates in the Soviet Union of
the 1920s: the artist is supposed to take part in the planning
and execution of a total transformation of society for the
sake of the people conceived as a collective. The last painting
was announced when artists of this era were called upon to
turn themselves into constructors, and it took the form of a
monochrome. From the beginning two possibilities for the
monochrome were evident. On the one hand, Kazimir Malevichs
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Black Square (1915) placed itself within the legacy of the icon, as
is apparent from the way that it was hung high in a corner, just as
icons traditionally were, in the First Suprematist Exhibition in St.
Petersburg, thus evoking some notion of the absolute in its new
beginning. The chair in Kiaers Melnikov Project, placed against
the wall with pieces of fabric that become abstract paintings
found monochromesechoes the famous documentary
photograph of that exhibition. On the other hand, Aleksandr
Rodchenko in his three monochromes made from red, yellow,
and blue pure pigment roughly applied (1921) asserted the
sheer materiality of paint and the labor of painting without any
notion of transcendence. Even this was too retrograde for the
critic Nikolai Tarabukin, for whom monochrome painting was a
blind wall.2 As Tarabukin and his fellow revolutionaries argued,
artists must abandon the making of objects of contemplation
for the practical transformation of the social environment as a
place for collective life.
Melnikov is exemplary according to Kiaer in part because, in his
private studio constructed like a fortress tower, he returned from
architecture to painting after the announced end of painting.
What would it be to make a painting after painting that would
not be a return to what painting was before its purported end?
Around the time Malevich was making paintings that effaced the
past in the name of a radical new beginning, Marcel Duchamp was
taking existing objects and designating them as readymade
artworks. For Kiaer, to make a painting after painting is to make
a painting as a readymadeto take an already existing piece of
fabric and pin it to a stretcher, for example, or to hang a piece
of card.3 Just as Duchamp altered his readymades, so Kiaer will
sometimes add paint or some faint drawing to those surfaces that
already constitute paintings before he begins to work on them.
The things that Kiaer brings into the studio often bear a record
through marks, stains, crinkles, and cracks of the times and
places through which they have passed. One piece of fabric
used for Melnikov Project is one half of a tablecloth, the other
half of which had been burned, its embroidered flowers joined
by the stains left from a meal. Kiaers activity is not to make it
new but to allow the object to manifest itself as it is, sometimes
contributing a further trace or track of paint to the marks that
commemorate what it has undergone. As an artist, Kiaer acts as
an enabler (though his interventions, discreet as they may be,
are crucial) but he is also a producer, in the sense of bringing
the thing into presence in a particular way. In our discussion
at the studio, he mentioned the classical Greek distinction
between praxis and poiesis. Praxis involves a willed making or
doing that produces a determinate result. It depends on a linear
idea of time where effect follows cause. Poiesis, or production as
bringing into presence, involves a disclosure in which the human
participates but does not necessarily will.4

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The extreme attention that the philosopher Simone Weil stated

is what constitutes the creative faculty5 may be a good way
of describing what for Kiaer is facilitated by the artists studio.
Among the elements of Kiaers Melnikov Project we find part of
a tablecloth and two mattress covers unaltered except for being
stretched. A sheet of corrugated cardboard, painted white with
touches of silver, is arguably a painting that is also an altered
readymade. This is not painting as construction or Romantic
creation from nothing. Rather, already existing objects and
materials become the focus of a particular kind of attention,
involving both thought and perception, by being arranged in
relation to each other in a place that is somewhat set apart from
life governed by function and instrumentality.
Cast away, ruined, and discarded things become fragments of
a whole that is not given in advance, which is a way of actively
involving the reader or viewer in seeking or inferring what would
complete the fragment.6 The incompletion of the fragment
challenges the idea of totalitythe idea that lay behind
Constructivism as the total transformation of society. The
continuum of progressive realization, where what the future will
be is anticipated and to be attained by construction, gives way in
the Melnikov Project to the discontinuity of a present interrupted
by both the contingency of the past and a future that is not
determined by the present.
The fragment carries three implications. It is a piece of something
larger, a broken off part of a whole that it gestures towards,
yet it is also a complete, singular thing with its particular
characteristics, and therefore it raises the questiona social
questionof the relation of the individual to the community. The
fragment also involves a reference to a past when it may have
been complete and pristine, whereas in the present it is a ruin
and a palimpsest of traces, a record of the events that impacted
it. And as incomplete the fragment gestures towards a future
when it might achieve its wholeness. The fragment is united with
the model under the rubric of the project. Kiaers model of the
home studio in Melnikov Project is left incomplete, open to one
side. It involves a reference to the pastthe home studio that
was built in Moscowthat, rendered as an incomplete model,
recovers in the form of potentialat our contemporary moment
when the studio is once again being declared obsoletethe very
idea of the studio in which Kiaers work finds its first dwelling.
As something reduced in scale, even miniature, the model in
the installation becomes at once something very distant and at
the same time very close, indeed even internalized as a form of
thinking. The model can come after something that it represents
or before something that it proposes: it recedes into the past and
also implies a projection into the future. Since Bruegel Project
(1999), Kiaer has titled many of his installations with the word
project, which says something about his method, which is, out
of a combination of research and encounter, to bring together
disparate elements that will stimulate a form of thoughtful,
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questioning seeing on the part of the viewer. Aided by the

presence of the model, the other parts of the installation begin
to assume aspects that diverge from their sheer materiality: for
example, a piece of Styrofoam may suggest part of a ruin. It is
as if the viewer becomes involved in looking for the question
to which the exact way in which the elements are disposed is
the answer. The model thus draws attention to the as in the
Wittgensteinian seeing something as something that affects
all perception, whether implicitly or explicitly, although in Kiaers
installations what comes after the as is left open.7
Kiaers model of part of the Melnikov studio and house is left
deliberately unfinished: the circle is not completed. What is
disclosed in Kiaers studio is the potential of things.8 If the
consideration of the artwork as a formal composition would
imply that it necessarily has to be the way that it is as a bounded
wholeas ideas of organic unity suggestKiaers work,
rather, emphasizes openness and contingency. The things he
uses have been marked by the events that have befallen them:
stains, scratches, abrasions, folds, crumples, tears, and all the
impressions of their circumstances and histories. There is no
necessity to these marks, they could have been otherwise,
which is precisely what is meant by the word contingent.
Contingency thus involves potentiality.9 The very materiality of
the work is allowed to emerge insofar as the elements brought
into the studio are freed from the linear time of means and ends
and released into a virtual multiplicity of possible configurations,
echoed in the degree to which the installations may vary in
different locations. Through the insertion of the model and
other decisions and adjustments, the artist creates a work that
is determinate and specific in its character while open to being
seen and interpreted in ways that change as the viewer moves
near to or back from a piece of fabric on the wall or bends down
to take a closer look at an object on the floor. Indeed, in the
encounter with the installation, embodied seeing and thinking
are inseparable.
Among the elements Kiaer has prepared for Melnikov Project are
a pair of padded, striped, dirty white mattress covers, distantly
resembling, once they are stretched, the Achrome paintings
begun in 1957 by the Italian Piero Manzoni, which themselves
have a somewhat medical connotation of bandages and plaster.
In addition Kiaer had fabricated an inflatable using a reflective
foil emergency blanket with a crumpled surface, which at the
time of writing he is considering leaving flaccidly horizontal,
like an air bed. These are allusions to Melnikovs Laboratory of
Sleep, part of the utopian Green City where industrial workers
would recover from the strain of the workload under Stalins
plan. There scientists would control the temperature, humidity,
and air pressure; the rustle of leaves and cooing of nightingales
would be heard; and scents would waft through the building. If
that did not work, the beds would start to gently rock to ease
tension and anxiety.10

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As Kiaer reminds us, Melnikov also designed the sarcophagus

for Lenins tomb and in his home created great concrete slabs
on which to sleep.11 The little yellow transparent plastic dome as
a possible element of the installation may have a double allusion
to the greenhouse of this garden city and the crystalline cover of
Lenins sarcophagus. It is as if Kiaer is hinting that the renewal
of sleep involves more than a natural cycle of refreshment,
but rather an awakening that passes through death, just as
painting takes on a potential after its end. In the Melnikov
Project this is reflected in the play between the horizontal and
the vertical: bedcovers stretched and raised to the vertical on
the wall; a broken sheet of polystyrene placed horizontally on
the floor abutting a wall; and in the studio, where the exhibit is
being prepared, the serendipity of an inflatable containing a foil
emergency blanket that wouldnt stand erect but sank to the
floor looking like nothing other than an air mattress.
Kiaers relation to his materials could be seen as acts of salvage.
Crumpled foil, corrugated cardboard, a broken slab of Styrofoam,
a piece of colored lighting gel, a half-burned tablecloth, and
old high chair are cherished. If the work consisted of formal
arrangements of these elements, its beauty would be too easily
won, as if the studio or gallery were to become the surface
for a poignant collage. Rather, the way the work is disposed
summons questions concerning why the pieces or fragments
matterhow the insignificant, the marginal, the used-up, the
abject, and the tiny are no less important than the monumental,
and perhaps infinitely more so. This cannot be brought about by
monumentalizing the small or the ordinary. As Walter Benjamin
writes in his essay on Franz Kafka, the coming of the Messiah
will not be an overwhelming force, brought about by an act of will
resulting in a total transformation, but will rather conform to the
words of a great rabbi who once said that he did not wish to
change the world by force, but would only make a slight adjustment
in it.12 A slight adjustment that makes all the difference.
Michael Newman

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NOTES
See Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, eds., The Studio Reader: On
the Space of Artists (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2010).
1

For a discussion of Tarabukins essay, see Maria Gough, The Artist as

Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 12149.
2

See Thierry de Duve, The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas, in Kant
After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 199279.
3

For the account of poiesis and praxis that Kiaer referred to in conversation
with the author, see Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans.
Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5993.
4

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd, quoted in Simone
Weil: An Anthology, ed. Sin Miles (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 212.
5

For the philosophical and poetic implications of the incompletion of the

Romantic fragment, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy,
The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 3958.
6

For seeing as see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,

trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 193214.
7

See Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989).
8

For the relation of contingency to potentiality, see Giorgio Agamben,

Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 24371.
9

S. Frederick Starr, Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 179.
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11

See Ian Kiaer, Cylindrical House Studio, 1929, in this publication.

Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death, in

Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 134.
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Cylindrical House Studio, 1929

The distinctive shape of Melnikovs two conjoined cylinders
and strange hexagonal windows speak of a structure beyond
everyday dwelling. Its geometry, white surface, and remote,
singular poise appear designed to provoke rumor of more
complex workings within; as if the circular solution and eclipsing
diameters might conform to some mystical planetary alignment
or map an overlapping design of halos for an icon of orthodox
saints. There can be few buildings with this many windows, over
sixty in all, that remain so insistently insular. It may even be the
quantity that works to deny any notion of view and emphasize
their alternative function as luminaries. They absorb light from
outside but hardly provide an inward glimpse in return. There
can be no looking in. It is somehow appropriate that their origin
can be traced to a fortification surrounding Moscows ancient
Belgorod district as they affect to alienate and repel the world.
Its not only the windows honeycomb shape that might prompt
the idea of bees but the way in which its smooth exterior wall,
if sliced open, would reveal a complex of interlocking work and
living spaces where the incubation of thought and sleep meet.
The architect wanted to integrate sleeping and working, dwelling,
and thinking throughout his building; hence living-room, studio,
and bedroom alternate and dissect like a layered Venn diagram.
It is said of the cylindrical motif that he had the Russian hearth
in mind1the hearth as core of the house with the notion of
warmth enclosed, its most interior part. To conceive this notion
of hearth/heart is to turn the whole building inwards. To think of
Melnikovs building is to think from its inside.
In the house, work and sleep are curiously connected. The
circular bedroom is directly below the circular studio. The walls
are painted warm yellow, the beds are stone slabs that rise up
from the floor like altars that render sleep an almost-sacred
inactivity. For Melnikov sleep was an area of intense study.2 He
wrote about a lifetime of sleep,
twenty years of lying down without consciousness, without
guidance as one journeys into the sphere of mysterious
worlds to touch unexplored depths of the sources of curative
sacraments, and perhaps of miracles.3
Here sleep becomes a means of passing from one world to
another, mysterious and indeterminate, a place for works
reserve to be restored and nourished. However, such spaces
have a way of shifting tone, from sleeps place to deaths space.
From the thirties on, sleeps curative sacraments turned to
restless slumber as Stalins censure became the architects
incubus, frustrating any possibility for practice. In such light
the warm glow darkens into night, and those concrete beds
come ever closer to mortuary slabs. Without course to sleep
Melnikov turned to dreaming, closing inwards to past projects
and painting pictures.
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The beginning of those concrete beds perhaps lay in the

commission the architect received to design Lenins glass
sarcophagus. In this, his first built structure, he had to provide
a plinth of sleep for a cadaver forever preserved, a place of
pilgrimage and peeringa windowed tomb. There is something
determinedly circular in how this first work, which signals his
professional birth, presents itself as a death work. As if somehow opportunity demanded he earn through experience what
he had conceived through commission. He could not know his
cylindrical house studio, designed with such optimism, as an
ideal space for living and work, would become in time a place for
sleep, a house for a corpse.
Ian Kiaer

NOTES
This essay first appeared in the Autumn 2010 issue (no. 4) of the quarterly journal
Picpus and is reprinted here with the kind permission of its editors.
A. A. Strigalev, The Cylindrical House-Studio of 1927, in Konstantin Melnikov, and the
Construction of Moscow, eds. Mario Fosso and Maurizio Meriggi (Milan: Skira editore,
2000), 90.
1

In 1929 Melnikov designed a Laboratory of Sleep for workers in the Green City. See
S. Frederick Starr, Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1978), 179.
2

Ibid., 177.

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Biography
Born 1971, London, England
Lives and works in London
Education
2008 Royal College of Art, London, PhD Painting Research
2000 Royal College of Art, London, MA Painting
1995 Slade School of Art, University College London, BA Fine Art
Selected Solo Exhibitions
* with catalogue
2012
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
2011
Il Baciamano (A Nobleman Kissing a Ladys Hand), Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice
2010
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Endnote, pink, Kunstverein Mnchen, Munich
2009
COMMA 15: Ian Kiaer, Bloomberg Space, London
Three Proposals, SE8, London
Project Room: Ian Kiaer, Alison Jacques Gallery, London
What Where, Galleria Civica dArte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy*
2007
Bruegel Project, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Ian Kiaer, Alison Jacques Gallery, London
2006
Erdrindenbau, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan
2005
The Grey Cloth, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Art Statements, Alison Jacques Gallery, Art 36 Basel, Switzerland
British School at Rome, Rome
2004
Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan
Endless House Project, Alison Jacques Gallery, London*
2003
Art Now: Ian Kiaer, Tate Britain, London
Art Statements, Art Basel Miami Beach
Endless Theatre Project, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Interstice/Double Impact, W139, Amsterdam
2001
Asprey Jacques Gallery, London

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Selected Group Exhibitions

* with catalogue
2012
Utopia GESAMTKUNSTWERK, Galerie Belvedere, Vienna*
2011
Au loin, une le!, FRAC Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France*
Arte Essenziale, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt*
British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham
Castle Museum and New Art Exchange, UK; traveled to Hayward Gallery, London; Centre for
Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art and Tramway, Glasgow; Peninsula Arts, Plymouth Arts
Centre, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery and Royal William Yard, UK*
All of This and Nothing: 6th Hammer Invitational, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles*
Nothing Personal, Marcelle Alix, Paris
Painting Expanded, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
2010
The Responsive Subject, Mu.Zee, Ostend, Belgium*
The Mystics, Civic Room, London
Everynight, I Go to Sleep, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London
2009
Concrete Island, Tate Britain, London
The Spectacle of the Everyday, 10th Lyon Biennale, France*
Material Intelligence, Kettles Yard, Cambridge; traveled to Huddersfield Art Gallery, UK
2008
Ian Kiaer and Sara MacKillop, International Project Space, Birmingham, UK*
No Information Available, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels
Nineteenthirtysix, Pullman Court, London
Social Diagrams, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany*
Too Early for Vacation, ev+a, Limerick, Ireland*
2007
Not Only Possible but Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War, 10th Istanbul Biennial*
Poor Thing, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland*
Various Small Fires, Royal College of Art, London*
Joke, Satire, Irony, and Serious Meaning, 3rd European Triennial of Small Sculpture,
Galerija Murska Sobota, Slovenia*
2006
The Impossible Landscape, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
Satellites, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Street: Behind the Clich, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands*
Highlights of the VAC Collection, Instituto Valencia dArt Modern, Madrid*
Of Mice and Men, 4th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, KW Institute of Contemporary Art*
2005
Music of the Future, Gasworks, London
Contained, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
LondonARTfutures, Contemporary Art Society, Bloomberg SPACE, London
The Way We Work Now, Camden Arts Centre, London
Ordering the Ordinary, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Bidibidobidiboo: Works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, Fondazione
Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
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Fiction in Contemporary Art, Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourists Eye, Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago; traveled to Hayward Gallery, London*
2004
Material as Metaphor, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Empty Garden II, Watari-um Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
This is not a home this is a house, LObservatoire, Brussels
Wild-Eyed Boy from Freecloud, Galleria Comunale dArte Contemporanea, Bologna*

2000
UBS Painting Prize, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London*
EverydayImagesEvery Day, Rogaland Kunstnersenter, Stavanger, Norway*
Manifesta 3: Borderline SyndromeEnergies of Defence, International Biennial of
Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia*
Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (with Athanasios Argianas and Nick Laessing)

Works in the Exhibition

1. Melnikov project, small screen, 2012
Pencil on paper, acetate, and
found wood frame
25 x 26 3/8 inches framed
2. Melnikov project, chair (yellow), 2012
Chair, acetate, acrylic on taffeta, oil on calico,
and acrylic on linen
Chair: 37 3/8 x 11 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches
Yellow acetate: 48 1/8 x 38 5/8 inches
Model 1: rubber band
12 5/8 x 5 1/2 x 4 inches
Model 2: acetate dome
4 3/8 x 7 7/8 x 7 7/8 inches
Painting 1: acrylic on taffeta
48 1/8 x 42 1/8 inches
Painting 2: oil on calico
24 1/8 x 16 1/8 inches
Painting 3: acrylic on linen (unstretched)
16 1/8 x 14 5/8 inches
3. Melnikov project, lab a (silver), 2011
Silver cloth, paper acrylic, and silver leaf
Silver painting: silver cloth
59 7/8 x 54 inches
Paper acrylic and silver leaf:
44 7/8 x 34 1/4 inches

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4
5

2003
Ian Kiaer & Jeff Ono, Asprey Jacques Gallery, London
Harmony, at Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art & Life, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo*
Atto Primo, Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan
Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, 50th Venice Biennale*
The Straight or Crooked Way, Royal College of Art, London
2002
Building Structures, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York
Artists Imagine Architecture, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston*
The Bold and the Beautiful, The Pavilions, London; RMIT Project Space, Melbourne, Australia

4. Melnikov project, lab b (silver), 2011

Inflatable: silver foil, plastic
19 3/4 x 55 1/8 x 86 5/8 inches

5. Melnikov project, screen, 2011

Acrylic on taffeta, acetate, cardboard, pencil, and cement
Painting: acrylic on taffeta
78 3/4 x 55 1/8 inches
Model 1: acetate, cardboard, pencil
25 1/4 x 16 1/2 x 18 1/8 inches
Model 2: cardboard, acetate, cement
19 3/4 x 9 7/8 x 8 1/4 inches
6. Melnikov project, sleep, 2011
Acrylic on found material
Diptych, each painting 74 3/4 x 57 inches
7. Melnikov project, cloth, 2011
Wax and acrylic on linen
78 3/4 x 55 1/8 inches

All works courtesy the artist;

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and
Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

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List of Illustrations
All works by Ian Kiaer unless otherwise noted.
Cover: Melnikov project, screen, 2011 (detail). Installation view, Ian Kiaers studio, London, 2011.
Photo: Louise O Kelly.
pp. 315: Installation views, Aspen Art Museum, 2012. Photos: Jason Dewey.
p. 3: Melnikov project, small screen, 2012.
pp. 45: Melnikov project, chair (yellow), 2012.
p. 6: Melnikov project, chair (yellow), 2012, and Melnikov project, lab a (silver), 2011.
p. 7: Melnikov project, lab a (silver), 2011 (detail).
p. 8: Melnikov project, chair (yellow) 2012; Melnikov project, lab a (silver), 2011;
and Melnikov project, lab b (silver), 2011.
p. 9: Melnikov project, lab b (silver), 2011 (detail).
pp. 1011: Melnikov project, lab b (silver), 2011; Melnikov project, screen, 2011;
and Melnikov project, sleep, 2011.
pp. 1213: Melnikov project, screen, 2011 (details).
p. 14: Melnikov project, sleep, 2011, and Melnikov project, cloth, 2011.
p. 15: Melnikov project, cloth, 2011.
pp. 1729: Installation views, Ian Kiaers studio, London, 2011. Photos: Louise O Kelly.
Images courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and Alison Jacques Gallery, London.
p. 17: Melnikov project, lab b (silver), 2011.
p. 18: Melnikov project, chair (yellow), 2012.
p. 21: Melnikov project, cloth, 2011 (detail).
p. 22: Melnikov project, screen, 2011.
p. 25: Melnikov project, sleep, 2011 (detail).
p. 26: Melnikov project, lab a (silver), 2011 (detail).
p. 29: Konstantin Melnikov, Melnikov House, 19279. Photo: Robert Oerlemans.
p. 31 above: Konstantin Melnikov, bed chamber of the architects home. Melnikov Family Archive, Moscow.
p. 31 below: Konstantin Melnikov, preliminary variants of sarcophagus for V.I. Lenin, 1924.
Melnikov Family Archive, Moscow.

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