Zoe Zenghelis Exhibition, curated by AA tutor Hamed Khosravi, featured in Financial Times

The exhibition of AA alumna Zoe Zenghelis' paintings, 'Do you remember how perfect everything was?', initially exhibited at Betts Projects, has been reviewed by Edwin Heathcote of the FT. The exhibition is currently available to view online, and will soon be coming to the AA, alongside a publication edited by the curator of the exhibition, AA tutor Hamed Khosravi.

Heathcote commented:

"Crowded on to one wall, academy-style, is a lifetime of work, a line passing through towers and tombs, trees and cubist landscapes, but the thread that ties them all together is architecture, a certain type of tectonic representation. Pastel superblocks collide with deep shadows cast by looming wedges, towers appear as subsiding gravestones, buildings are scattered like disruptive pebbles on a sandy beach and walls are draped like curtains. The types of architecture contribute to a mood: melancholy, angst, playfulness, ecstasy and ennui through form, colour and distribution.

Zenghelis tells me she always saw herself as a painter, yet her medium is architecture; the concerns about objects in space, the grid, fragmentation and mass have remained remarkably consistent. The works on show here span the whole of Modernist history and historiography, from early experiments in reductive form to the rediscovery of Modernism as a visionary medium in itself, one which had at its heart the building of a new post-capitalist society.

Architects who think they are artists quickly become a problem, mistaking buildings for sculpture and producing unusable and overblown structures. But artists who work with architecture are a very different proposition: less destructive, more contemplative, capable of creating something closer to beauty. This is an engaging and engrossing little show from exactly one such artist."

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