Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet
Tomas Saraceno, Flying Garden (detail), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
On show at Barbican June 19 through October 18, 2009, Radical Nature highlights a 40-year history of environmentally concerned artists, activists, architects and other Utopian thinkers. The result is promoted as “one fantastical landscape, with each piece introducing into the gallery space a dramatic portion of nature. ”
The curators have commissioned special, and restaged historical installations, within a cross-generational show. Key figures such as
the architectural collective Ant Farm and visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, artists Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson are shown alongside pieces by a younger generation of practitioners including Heather and Ivan Morison, R&Sie(n) , Philippe Rahm architects and Simon Starling.
Radical Nature can’t rightly be called a retrospective, but it succeeds in that way, capturing pivotal moments and players from nearly a half-century, and, appropriately, paying attention to the shifting ground on which they worked.
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