'One Thousand Doors, No Exit'
"One Thousand Doors, No Exit" is currently on view until April 2nd at the Graham Foundation in Chicago. The exhibition features two photographic series by Swiss-born artist Nicolas Grospierre. Grospierre—who is currently based in Poland and studied sociology at the London School of Economics and political science at the Institut d'Etudes Politique de Paris—explores the tension between perception and truth in architecture as well as architecture's capacity to stand as an artifact of ideology. TATTARRATTAT (2010) snakes through the interior of a 14th century palazzo, capturing images via reflections in convex mirrors, and Hydroklinika (2004) shows a Soviet-era spa in Lithuania just before it was partially demolished and converted into a water park. "The frozen state of the architecture from this perspective is very telling about the Marxist project," says Grospierre of Hydroklinika. Reflecting his educational background, Grospierre's documentation of the communist relic takes a sociologic lens to architecture. "Incredible, Utopian, buoyant, but not practical, and not economically viable." Click through the slideshow for a look at "One Thousand Doors, No Exit."
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