‘Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was?’ is a two-part retrospective of the paintings of OMA co-founder Zoe Zenghelis, the first instalment of which is currently on show at Betts Project in London. Edwin Heathcote, the architecture critic of the Financial Times, discusses the work with Zenghelis and the exhibition’s curator, Hamed Khosravi.
‘The work in ‘Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was?’ can currently be viewed at www.bettsproject.com. The physical exhibition will reopen at the end of lockdown or once London is returned to Tier 3 restrictions and will remain open until 20 April 2021.
Zoe Zenghelis is an Athenian artist who has been living and working in London since her student years. After studying painting in Athens she continued her study in stage design and painting at the Regent Street Polytechnic under Frank Auerbach, Lawrence Gowing, and Leon Kossoff. She started her painting career as a founding member of OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), whose collaboration with other OMA members has widened their horizons and opened new opportunities for them in painting and architecture. Her paintings for OMA have been exhibited in many museums and galleries. Zenghelis’ independent works as a painter have been widely exhibited and published. The paintings are inspired by metropolitan structure, landform, and abstract tectonics. Yet the imagery is quintessentially modern and modernist: it is an imagery of the fragment, the collage, the assemblage, the parts standing for the whole, and often greater than the whole. From 1982 to 1993, in partnership with Madelon Vriesendorp, she ran the Colour Workshop at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
Hamed Khosravi is an architect and educator. He is a Unit Master of Diploma 7 and a Studio Master in the Projective Cities MPhil Programme at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Hamed’s writings are regularly published in journals, magazines, and books. His recent book, Gabriel Guevrekian: The Elusive Modernist, is published by Hatje Cantz in 2020.
Founded and directed by Marie Coulon, Betts Project, a London based commercial contemporary art gallery specialising in architecture. Since the gallery’s launch in 2016, she has promoted exhibitions from architects Peter Märkli, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Tony Fretton, Alexander Brodsky, Studio Mumbai Bijoy Jain, Caruso St John and Denise Scott Brown with the curatorial aim to present architectural objects as works of art. www.bettsproject.com
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