This bundle includes three Ikon publications highlighting artists who have focused on architecture, from Brutalist aesthetics to the elaborate designs of global tech headquarters.
Langlands & Bell Internet Giants : Masters of the Universe accompanied the 2018 exhibition by British artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell. Featuring the iconic architecture of the global technology companies such as Apple, Facebook, Alibaba and Google, the exhibition included a series of relief sculptures, installations, digital animations and portraits that explore the increasingly profound influence they have on our lives in the age of ‘Big Data’.
Transition accompanied Perry Roberts’ 2007 exhibition. It consisted entirely of new work, commissioned by Ikon, made in response to the architecture in Birmingham. Throughout the UK, architecture surviving from the 1960s and 70s has an ambivalent status – frequently despised and often with its future in question – poised somewhere between a state of decline and regeneration. Such buildings are the focus of Roberts’ aesthetic enquiry, raising questions concerning our experience of the built environment, reflecting and shaping the nature of everyday life.
Why Contribute to the Spread of Ugliness? accompanied the 2011 exhibition by Birmingham-based artist Stuart Whipps. The exhibition included a selection of photography and video reflecting on the changing nature of cultural value. The major work of this exhibition, Why Contribute to the Spread of Ugliness? (2011), centres on 487 boxes of archived paperwork from the architectural practices of John Madin, the architect behind Birmingham's now-demolished Central Library.
These catalogues usually retail for almost £38.
