Bjarne Melgaard: A House to Die In

The ICA is delighted to announce that Bjarne Melgaard will be the subject of a major solo exhibition coinciding with London’s Frieze Art Fair. Having spent much of his time in Norway, Melgaard currently lives in New York where he occupies a vast studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

The exhibition, A House to Die In (2012) is the result of a close collaboration between Melgaard and award-winning Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta.

Since 2011, Melgaard and Snøhetta have exchanged architectural drawings, models and documents as they work towards the realisation of a purpose-built house, commissioned by the Selvaag family and Sealbay AS, where Melgaard will live and work.

For his exhibition in the ICA upper and lower galleries, Melgaard will present a 1:1 facade of the proposed building, alongside models and drawings that form part of a wider body of research. This material constitutes the first stage in the construction of the final building, scheduled to be built in 2014 in Oslo, Norway.

The collaborative process between Melgaard and Snøhetta is a positive struggle in which both parties are constantly challenged, notably in Snøhetta's interpretation of Melgaard’s two-dimensional and analogue drawings through three-dimensional digital renderings of the objects. Furthermore, various processes of mathematical abstraction have led to multiple stages of representation of the original information, namely Melgaard’s vision of a house ‘to die in’, a project outside their comfort zone.

Snøhetta’s focus is primarily architectural; whilst Melgaard’s foremost fear is to end up inhabiting the territory of ‘pure architecture’. In this process Snøhetta depart from their comfort zone and well-rehearsed creative processes and seek a new approach to constructing built forms. At the same time there is a fine balance between thinking and simply producing in this process, as the aim is to maintain the inherent quality and identity of Melgaard’s work in the end result.

The works in the upper galleries will further examine the relationship between mental health and production, displaying a body of works developed in partnership between Melgaard and a group of schizophrenic artists who have responded directly to the artist’s existing works.