RECONSTRUCTING MONDRIAN (2013-2023)

(The following text was written by the Hugh Lane Gallery for the solo exhibition Reconstructing Mondrian in 2023)

Reconstructing Mondrian is a new body of work produce and directed by the Irish artist John Beattie over the last ten years and features a cinematic video projection with a new series of hand-printed large-format photographs.

The central focus of this work is based on Beattie’s filming of Piet Mondrian’s reconstructed Paris studio (1921-1936), which was built by the Dutch architect Frans Postma, the founding Director of Stichting reconstructie Atelier Mondrian (STAM). Beattie views the Artist’s Studio on the one hand, as a practical and function space, but also reveals how it embodies conceptual and philosophical value transcending the physical space. Reconstructing Mondrian explores the multifarious materiality that is the Artist’s Studio; a fixed interior, it also possesses a creative significance as well as a social and political direction.

As the project evolved, we discussed the central role a cultural institution would play both critically and conceptually in its realisation. Hugh Lane Gallery has an exciting exhibition history of institutional critique and its curatorship of the permanent studio of Francis Bacon made it an obvious collaboration. The contrasting relationship between Francis Bacon’s studio and Beattie’s cinematic and moving-image (reconstruction) of Piet Mondrian’s studio opens up a provocative narrative which questions the representation of art historical myths with the framework of a museum.

In 2006 referencing Daniel Buren’s seminal text on “The Function of the studio”, Hugh Lane Gallery presented the exhibition The Studio which set out to investigate the role, idea and function of the artist’s studio in the production of art. Burren participated in this exhibition with his installation Three Colours for a Façade in Dublin. He outlined his main problem with the studio was that it is a place of creation of portable artworks which have to compromise or adapt to unknown destinations. It is a place where works are produced which later will be exhibited in an entirely different context, for example, a gallery or a museum, and through that shift of location, it fundamentally changes their meaning.

Reconstructing Mondrian continues that debate.

Funded by The Arts Council of Ireland Visual Artist Bursary and Projects Awards. Credits and acknowledgements are listed at the end of this page with links to further information on the making of the work and exhibition.

All images below are © John Beattie - unless otherwise stated.