POETRY, MUSIC, ARCHITECTURE: Richard Artschwager, Julia Fish, Louis I. Kahn, Barry Le Va, Jorinde Voigt

Poetry, Music, Architecture presents drawings that reflect the natural connection between sound, language, and built form: three ways we shape and experience the world. Like a sonnet’s structure, musical notation, or an architect’s blueprint, drawing becomes a tool for thinking, planning, and giving form to ideas. Of the three media, music alone is formless in its completed state, yet it continues to inspire artists who work with and through structure. Poetry, music, and architecture share rhythm, harmony, and cadence. The works by Richard Artschwager, Barry Le Va, Louis I. Kahn, Julia Fish, and Jorinde Voigt each engage with language, sound, and structure in unique ways. Together, their art offers a new understanding of the interconnected nature of words, rhythm, and space—one that puts drawing at the centre of this triple Venn diagram, the core condition for thought to become form. 

Richard Artschwager’s Arched Passageway draws directly from architecture and interiors, and carries a sense of sound moving through space, as does Window with its rhythmic lines. The everyday object was a central part of Artschwager’s imagination. “Door, Window, Table, Basket, Mirror, Rug”—six objects he regularly returned to—became a long-standing vocabulary from the 1970s onward, appearing across drawing, sculpture, and painting. One example from this series is included in the exhibition.

Julia Fish’s Capriccio works connect music and architecture through language and the dual meaning of the term: in painting, an architectural fantasy that assembles imagined spaces; in music, a composition that is free in form, fast, expressive and virtuosic. Her works reference through their title and refer to these qualities, uniting structure, variation, and a sense of interior rhythm.

Louis I. Kahn’s drawing BATTLEMENT, Carcassonne, France is an expression of architectural observation with markings that resemble asemic writing. His VIEW FROM THE PARTHENON, ACROPOLIS, Athens, Greece reflects the period he spent in Rome and Greece—years that shaped his understanding of light, structure, and the poetic clarity that defined his later work and philosophy. 

Barry Le Va’s Studies for a Bunker Sculpture draw on Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, which documents the rounded concrete bunkers built along the Atlantic Wall. Designed to absorb and deflect impact, these structures represent an architecture of violence. In his drawings, silhouettes of bunkers appear alongside dense “coagulations,” which are symbolic of blood and its capacity to seal and protect. Large forms press inward around smaller circular shapes creating a feeling of tension—a body protecting itself, or from another perspective, looking out as through a mask—an inward-turning architecture that is both defensive and aware of outside force.

Jorinde Voigt’s Poem series puts experimental architectural forms into dialogue with written text. The geometric structures carry a sense of complex architecture, with the poem itself embedded within the form. Working primarily through drawing, Voigt creates compositions that read like musical scores or conceptual diagrams, mapping the movement of perception, memory, and thought.

RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER (1923-2013) forged a unique path in art from the early 1950s through the early 21st century, making the visual comprehension of space and the everyday objects that occupy it strangely unfamiliar. Artschwager moved through different media, materials, and visual preoccupations with a voraciousness, intelligence, and wit that allowed him to escape any box the art world might have wanted to construct around him. Artschwager’s highest devotion, perhaps, was not to art but to the art of looking, and looking long enough to see the world as it is: strange, weird, funny, and wonderfully confounding.

The work of JULIA FISH (b. 1950) can be characterized as both site-generated and context-specific: in temporary projects, installations, and in the on-going sequence of paintings and works on paper she develops in response to a close examination of the experience of living and working within her home and studio, a 1922 two-storey brick storefront in Chicago. Fish has described this process as one which “opens onto questions and critical approaches to the practice of painting, to drawing, and to the nuances and implications of representation / re-presentation.” Concurrent and influential research interests include the related disciplines of architecture, architectural history and theory.

LOUIS I. KAHN (1901–1974) was born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky on the island of Osel, off the coast of Estonia. His family immigrated to the United States when he was four, settling in Philadelphia, where they took the name Kahn upon becoming citizens. Regarded as one of the great master builders of the twentieth century, Kahn created architecture that combined structural clarity with a profound sense of light and presence. His buildings –among them the Salk Institute in La Jolla, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, and the National Assembly Building in Dhaka—embody an archaic beauty. 

From an early age, Kahn showed a gift for drawing. Too poor to afford art materials, he drew with burnt twigs and matches—an elemental gesture that remained with him throughout his life. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania under Paul Philippe Cret, inheriting a sense of disciplined classicism that he would later reinterpret in his own way. Kahn’s early work, shaped by the Depression and the International Style, focused on public housing. His mature voice emerged after a transformative period in Rome in the early 1950s, when the ruins of ancient architecture and the Mediterranean light gave form to his ideas about structure, silence, and light. The Yale University Art Gallery addition, completed soon after, marked the beginning of this new phase. His later works in India and Bangladesh —the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad and the National Assembly in Dhaka— represent the full flowering of his vision. Built from brick and concrete, their monumental geometries carry both timelessness and civic openness. His oeuvre may be modest compared to other architects of his stature, but its influence has been and continues to be massive. 

Originally trained as an architect, BARRY LE VA (1941-2021) was born in Long Beach, CA and attended California State University, Long Beach. However, his determination to “create work on my own terms” soon led him to the art department. He transferred to the Los Angeles College of Art and Design and then moved on to LA’s Otis Art Institute, where he received a BA and an MFA in 1964 and 1967 respectively. His art is often categorized as Scatter Art and Process Art, although his background in mathematics and architecture provided a strong foundation for his more structured tendencies. Le Va's drawings were central to his oeuvre in relation to his sculptures, serving as flexible blueprints, or what he called "plan views" for his sculptures. He strongly resisted the notion of a "finished" or "unfinished" piece, preferring instead to embrace the evolving nature of his work, as each realization introduced new dimensions of possibility.

JORINDE VOIGT (b. 1977) is a leading conceptual artist based in Berlin. From 2014 to 2019, she taught at Akademie der Bildenden Künste (AdBK) in Munich, and today she is a Professor of Conceptual Drawing and Painting at University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HfBK). Voigt often uses as her starting point a musical composition or a philosophical text. Throughout her career, Voigt has transformed complex and intangible notions from music, philosophy, and phenomenology into visual models characterized by intricate lines organized into patterns, networks, and entire systems that strike a balance between order and chaos. She often brings together drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture, inviting the viewer to create layers of subjective meaning through an aesthetic that feels at once personal and universal.