Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Radiant Metropolis, an exhibition of latest work by London-based artist Lucy Williams. This exhibition will mark the gallery’s third solo presentation with Williams and will likely be on view by way of January 8, 2026. The exhibition coincides with Williams’s new publication, Radiant Metropolis.
Williams’s works are fastidiously engineered to supply uncanny miniature worlds suspended between the second and third dimensions—facades which might be concurrently industrial and tactile. Drawing on modernist buildings and interiors, Williams redefines collage by way of intricately crafted mixed-media bas-reliefs. Her glossy, serene scenes of interval structure ripple with texture and aqueous reflections. She simulates the tiled surfaces of swimming swimming pools, the austere facades of Brutalist buildings, and the regimented rows of libraries and bookcases. Painstakingly hand-crafted, Williams constructs her works in ascending layers of various supplies similar to paper, Plexiglas, wooden veneer, cloth, piano wire, and thread.
Starting with a full-scale pencil drawing, Williams creates a digital copy from which she laser cuts the structural base and hand-cuts coloured paper to type curtains, blinds, books, vases, pots, and lampshades. Every bit is laid on high of the drawing till she is able to collage inside a shallow area, including paper dwelling furnishings as she builds the work. Panels are over-stitched with thread, and a Perspex layer is used to copy the home windows, all of which have been etched and painted by hand so as to add additional element. Of her course of, she says: “It’s a must to give it as a lot time as potential, it’s actually vital, as a result of in time is the transformation.”
Via embroidery and a heat tonal palette, Williams’s work exploits the strain between the humane, intimate areas she produces and the hard-edge geometric buildings she references. The perceived depth and inherent flatness of the work occupy the liminal area between portray and sculpture. “Her work resonates with the textures and geometries of Anni Albers and Jean Arp, Alexander Calder and Ruth Asawa—not simply of their kinds, however within the vitality, dedication, and intentionality they dropped at their work,” stated Joseph Becker, Curator of Structure and Design on the San Francisco Museum of Trendy Artwork.
The exhibition title Radiant Metropolis comes from Le Corbusier’s unrealized architectural proposal for a utopian megalopolis that will seamlessly combine humankind with nature and the technological improvements of the 20 th century. The concrete flats—composed of modular models, imposing towers, and symmetry—have been conceived to handle pressing housing wants and to make use of trendy structure as a instrument for societal reform. Whereas Radiant Metropolis itself was by no means realized, its ideas got here to life within the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. The patchwork play of colour and lightweight throughout the façade of what would possibly in any other case have been a monotonous expanse resulted in certainly one of trendy structure’s most iconic designs. In Radiant Metropolis, Williams captures the fragile steadiness of materiality, form, and colour that made Unité d’Habitation so visually resonant. She does this by way of a number of iterations, probing the strain between social egalitarianism and a dehumanizing uniformity. Radiant Metropolis will function each representational and summary works by Williams. In the course of the pandemic, she started experimenting with non-representational compositions to discover the rhythmic, repetitive visible qualities of type. This experimentation allowed her to develop new threading methods, which she then introduced into her representational works, together with miniature variations of the abstractions themselves. “Slate, aubergine and rose triangles float over vertical threads of various colors and thicknesses, including a lyrical stringed component to the already dynamic kinds. In these, Williams controls area just like the modernists Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth earlier than her,” stated artwork critic Charlotte Mullins. Although the determine by no means seems in her work, one want solely view it in particular person to expertise the narrative energy of her areas—how they draw the viewer in, each baffled by their fabrication and longing to occupy their meditative worlds.
