‘Radiant Lines’ at Nature Morte, Berlin

Nature Morte hosts a solo show of new works by Seher Shah. The show takes its title from Le Corbusier's concept of La Ville Radieuse, ‘The Radiant City’, a concept developed from the 1930’s onwards and which encapsulates the artist’s ideas of reforming society through his modernist approaches to town planning.

Fundamentally utopian and socialist in their ambition, the most prominent Radiant City projects are Unité d’Habitation – a variety of modernist social housing units in France and Germany – and Chandigarh, the capital of the northern Indian states Punjab and Haryana, which Le Corbusier planned in its entirety.

Born 1975 in Karachi, Pakistan, the artist grew up in London, Brussels, and New York. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. Her select recent exhibitions include Object Anxiety at Scaramouche, New York (solo); ‘Paper to Monument’, Nature Morte, New Delhi (solo); ‘Brute Ornament’ at the Green Art Gallery, Dubai; ‘Lines of Control’ at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, New York; ‘On Rage’ at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Eccentric Architecture and Generation 1. 5, Queens Museum of Art, New York; ‘Drawing Space’ at Green Cardamom, London; New York to Los Angeles at GBK, Sydney; and ‘Zeichnungen: conceptual and concrete drawings’ at the Gisele Linder Gallery, Basel.

The main body of work in her latest show recalls the modular facade of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’ Habitation of Marseille. In the series Unit Object Drawings (2012) Seher Shah breaks the facade’s grid into its different structural components and intersects it with solid geometric shapes. The structure of the facade expands and unfolds in the delicate drawings and the repetition of form creates an ambiguity as to whether one is looking at separate objects or in fact at one object from various perspectives.

The four-part drawing Study for a Totem (2012) again uses the Cartesian grid of the facade and depicts a single modernist object without the context of a landscape.