Madelon Vriesendorp

MADELON VRIESENDORP was born in 1945 in Holland. In 1964 she studied in Amsterdam at the Rietveld Academy and later worked on the restoration of old frescoes and as a designer of stage costumes, books and jewellery. Five years later she enrolled at Central St. Martins School of Art in London. She exhibited her work at the Workshop and the Serpentine Gallery, among others.

In 1972 she moved to Ithaca and then New York with her husband, Rem Koolhaas. While in New York, Vriesendorp cofounded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture with Koolhaas, Elia and Zoe Zenghelis. Paintings she produced at the time were used for book and magazine covers, notably on the cover of Delirious New York in 1978 by Rem Koolhaas. They were exhibited at the New York Guggenheim and Max Protetch galleries, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Berlin’s Aedes Gallery and Gallery Ma in Tokyo among others.

Works:

Flagrant Délit, Artist's Revision, 1985

Exhibited at: New York Guggenheim Museum, Max Protetch Gallery, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Berlin’s Aedes Gallery and Gallery Ma in Tokyo, among others

“…OMA architects are also dealing here with our unconscious view of the city. With the images of the city we carry deep in our minds. The OMA schemes exaggerate certain things, such as theatricality, congestion and living drama.

Miss Vriesendorp places the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in bed together – the two greatest fantasy skyscrapers of the 1930’s are locked in romance as the RCA Building, sign of the impending modernism that was to put an end to their joyous affair, bursts in the door like a detective catching them in the act.

It is a picture of grace and wit and expresses perfectly a notion of Mr Koolhaas’ – that the spirit of internse theatricality of New York has been lost to a banal modern dreariness. The picture was used for the jacket of his new book, “Delirious New York,” which is being published this month by the Oxford University Press to coincide with the Guggenheim show.”

- Paul Goldberger, Guggenheim ‘Sparkling Metropolis’, New York Times, 1978

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The City of the Captive Globe Revisited, 1994

“…The City of the Captive Globe is devoted to the artificial conception and accelerated birth of theories, interpretations, mental constructions, proposals and their infliction on the World, It is the capital of Ego where, science art poetry and forms of madness compete under ideal conditions to invent, destroy and restore the world of phenomenal Reality. Each science or mania has its own plot. On each plot stands an identical base, built from heavily polished stone. And this is made possible because of the grid, each block represents a different ideology.

The revised version of the Captive Globe was created for the Le Cite Exhibition in the Pompidou Centre, Paris. To make a distinction between the old and new paintings, I sneaked in a skeleton version of Rem’s competition for the Grand Bibiothèque.

- Rem Koolhaas, Office of Metropolitan Architecture