In the summer of 2017, George Rush spent three long days visiting the Barcelona Pavilion. The gouache paintings in this show are based on selections from the hundreds of photographs he took during that visit. Long interested in modernism, Rush was fascinated by the building’s history. Built as the German national pavilion for the Barcelona International Exhibition at the cusp of Europe’s descent into fascism and war, it was designed in 1929 by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, disassembled in 1930, and rebuilt in the 1980s. The pavilion now performs both a skip in time and simulation, uncannily complete and yet strangely lacking its own historical context. It was never a domestic, work, retail, or exhibition space, but is considered one of the most complete expressions of European modernist architecture. Rush is interested in how it functions today: is it a building, a museum, an art piece, or a spectacle? Does it illuminate the work of van der Rohe and Reich, or obscure the narrative of architecture’s social history? Perhaps, like painting, it has no function but to be itself, a space that both contains and abstracts and creates complex divisions of interior and exterior, here and there, figure and ground. And yet, like painting, it is not absent from the subject position of its viewers. How people play a role in the identities of buildings and paintings is at the heart of Rush’s interest in both. The photographs on which Rush bases his paintings show multiple and various ways visitors to the Barcelona Pavilion engage with each other and themselves -- as anywhere else, people take photographs, look at their cell phones, stare off into space, talk, stand around. Rush’s installation of gouache paintings offers the viewer glimpses of these actions within the pavilion, without creating a whole or essential image. A space that was created to be a demonstration of its own formal and social principals is now a reminder of how those principals have been mutated, abused, neglected, repurposed, and lost. These paintings allow for the Barcelona Pavilion to be seen as an allegory for the legacy of modernism in contemporary life.

George Rush is an artist living in Columbus, Ohio. He received an MFA from Columbia School of the Arts and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has had solo shows in the United States, Denmark, and Spain. His most recent projects before COVID-19 were a solo show at CLEA RSKY, Brooklyn, NY and as a participant in Dust: Plates of the Present at Centre Pompidou, Paris. He is a recipient of grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. This autumn he will be on fellowship in Dresden Germany, awarded jointly by the Greater Columbus Arts Council and Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen. He is Associate Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.