Ted Larsen: Works 2007-2023

Albert Frey was in love with the desert and with architecture. By fully integrating his designs with nature in the small desert town of Palm Springs, Frey’s work became iconic on an international scale.
— Brad Dunning

A comprehensive volume on Swiss-American architect Albert Frey (1903-1998), Inventive Modernist tracks the scope and significance of Frey’s career, from his early days in Paris working with Le Corbusier to his rise as the iconic architect of Palm Springs. His unique “simple but severe” style of Desert Modernism cemented his legacy as one of the most influential architects, not only in California, but also in the United States and the world.

With full access to Frey’s various archives, the book provides many rare and previously unexhibited architectural models, drawings, films, photographs, and furniture, and offers an exceptional visual guide that goes far beyond the mere documentation of finished buildings. New academic research, in-depth essays, and a thorough, illustrated listing of the architect’s projects between 1925 and 1997, serve to contextualize Frey’s relevance today while securing his importance as a twentieth-century architectural master. Published to coincide with a far-reaching exhibition at Palm Springs Art Museum, Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist presents a scrupulously researched and lavishly illustrated publication on the architect’s life and work.

David Goldes uses chemical and electrical transformations of materials such as graphite and silver to form the basis of his work. Many of the changes that occur on the drawing surfaces through the agency of high-voltage electricity and sulfur compounds are only partially controllable. Coupled with Goldes’ imagery, a hybrid practice of intention and unpredictability emerges. For the artist, this combination resonates with many of the uncertainties that we currently face. In the electrified works, the drawings yield evidence—blackened burns, holes and surface scarring—while the chemically altered silver leaf works show unplanned colored areas of oranges, greens and blues.

During the development of this work, organized and geometric forms gave way to abstract, fragmented, biomorphic forms. Ideas referencing instability and balance, the effects of proximity and adjacency, belief and illusion, as well as microscopic imaginings became intertwined with pressing social concerns of social upheaval and the global pandemic.

The work also offers a contrary motif rooted in the aesthetic qualities of the materials used, their properties, and the artist’s delight in harnessing ways of transforming them. Unpredictable Drawings evolved from a related photographic practice based on the artist's observations of physical phenomena related to electricity. This new body of work seeks to materially present the action of electricity and chemical change in the most direct fashion possible. The drawings are a shift from “a picture of” to “the thing itself” and can be seen as an expansion of Goldes' interest in a multilayered representation of phenomena.

…Corday aligns her compositions to the scale of the cosmos, somehow always connected to the out-there. She constantly reminds us that we, and the eyes and skin with which we might perceive her sculpture, are made of stardust. There’s no real difference between the materiality of the cosmos and ourselves.

This monograph covers the past twenty years of New York-based artist Christine Corday’s practice. Corday combines her interests in the sciences and fine arts to paint, sculpt, draw and design. Her artistic approach consists of manipulation of matter into different states, producing massive sculptures that viewers are meant to experience through touch, leaving memories on the surface of her work. 

”Since the turn of the century, Frecon has developed an open and flexible language that is recognizably hers. It is a language that asks questions rather than offers answers. It does so without cynicism, sarcasm, or male adolescent chest thumping.” 

— John Yau, Hyperallergic

Artwork by Suzan Frecon
Essay by Joachim Pissarro

Hardbound / 10.25 x 12.75 inches
22 color illustrations / 48 pages
ISBN: 9781934435298