When you need to improve wheelchair access to a building, or build a ski jump in your back garden, it might be worth giving Claude Parent a call. As a ground-breaking architect of several decades’ note the Frenchman will probably be too busy, but you never know. No harm in asking. Parent is the main man when it comes to slopes, curves and ramps, having dreamt up the architectural philosophy Fonction Oblique – a theory advocating wall-free design based on angles – with critic Paul Virilio in the 1960s. Parent has totally committed to the idea, living in working in buildings that push the boudaries of Fonction Oblique ever since.
Known as the “supermodernist” of French architecture, Parent has been getting Pythagorean at Tate Liverpool‘s Wolfson Gallery for a major installation, La Colline de l’Art (Art Hill), commissioned for the Liverpool Biennial project A Needle Walks into a Haystack. Curator Mai Abu ElDahab has worked with Parent to select a number of works from the Tate collection which emphasise his interest in exploring geometry. The off-kilter exhibition runs until 26 October.
Gillian Wise, born 1936
Looped Network Suspended in Pictorial Space 1974
Acrylic paint on plastic
1626 x 1219 x 23 mm
© Gillian Wise. Image courtesy Tate.
Francis Picabia, 1879-1953
The Fig-Leaf 1922
Oil paint on canvas
support: 2000 x 1600 mm frame
(without perspex box): 2062 x 1663 x 70 mm
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014
