Purple Residence

[09/01/2024]

Elizabeth Glaessner at the Purple Residence – Summer 2024

At the Cité Radieuse, a vertical “Machine for Living” (“Machine à Vivre”), Le Corbusier incorporated all aspects of everyday life for its inhabitants, including a kindergarten with swimming pool, guest rooms for visitors, a gymnasium and a solarium on the rooftop, as well as a street for shopping. The Cité Radieuse had everything except a studio for artists, certainly because Le Corbusier himself was an artist, the total artist: architect, designer, urban planner, painter, and writer. We have extended his original conception to include an artist residency, located in his former office: a creative unit (“Unité de Création”) within the housing unit (“Unité d’Habitation”).

The idea behind the Purple Residence is to explore the ways in which to inhabit the world today. This summer, we invited artist the young American painter Elizabeth Glaessner, whose work is in direct dialogue with Le Corbusier’s vision. For Le Corbusier, the connection with the world was shaped by the human figure, which he called the Modulor: a series of proportions to create a harmonious connection between the body, space, and nature. During her stay at the Purple Residence, Elizabeth Glaessner painted her own vision of the human figure in symbiosis with nature — while also expressing the contemporary failure of the modernist utopia. In her colorful, dreamy paintings, beings and nature exchange their qualities, proportions, and colors. In her dystopian landscapes, both the individual and the environment are in a constant state of metamorphosis. A world of transformations, reflections, and multiplicity. You enter the show through a gateway of paintings that lead you to the studio of the artist, and you’ll exit through her living space. The stage of a new “living machine,” connecting art, life, and dreams of a post-future.

Text by Olivier Zahm