NEW YORK — When a couple at yesterday’s Andy Warhol auction at Christie’s won the top bid for a silkscreen collage from the 1980s, the woman squealed to her husband, “Oh my god, we got it?!” He nodded, kissed her, and said, “Let’s go look at it!”

That kind of enthusiasm is rare in salesrooms these days. More often, the excitement amounts to an auction-house employee phoning in a foreign bid, or a deadpan dealer gambling on anything likely to turn a profit.

But this sale was unique, with an overwhelming 522 lots consigned by the Andy Warhol Foundation, which plans to use the proceeds to fund its grant-making programs. That meant that there was something for just about every taste and price point, ranging from just $2,375 to $1.3 million.

“It was the ultimate mashup of Warhol fans,” said advisor Warren Winegar. “There were some former groupies that wanted to try to capture an original piece of the action, and there were serious collectors, and a lot of other people who knew about the Warhol mystique and wanted to get something.”

Buyers phoned in from Italy, the United Arab Emirates, Indiana, and beyond, ultimately contributing to a $17-million total and 91 percent sell-through rate, which fell squarely within the $15-million to $22-million presale estimate.

“Today’s vigorous launch of the Warhol Foundation sales was met with enthusiasm by established and new collectors globally, including successful bidders from Mainland China, Russia, the European Union, the Middle East, and the Americas,” said Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art, Amy Cappellazzo, in a statement after the sale, noting that “photographs and prints perform[ed] exceedingly well.”

It’s been said that Christie’s also succeeded in registering a number of new clients in the wake of the sale. “They were kind of surprised,” said Joel Wachs, executive director of the Warhol Foundation. “There were many, many new people buying and signing up to bid online.”

The top lot of the day was a silkscreened butterfly from Warhol’s “Endangered Species” series, going for $1.26 million, including the Christie’s commission. Warhol’s “Bighorn Ram” from the same series went for a healthy $842,500, while a red-streaked Jackie Kennedy print more than doubled its high estimate at $626,500.

But there were some surprise losses as well. One bidder sitting nearby drew a big exclamation point in his catalogue next to one of Warhol’s “Piss Paintings” after it failed to find a buyer at its $800,000 to $1.2-million estimate.

“If there was one disappointment it was that a few of the most expensive works didn’t sell,” said Wachs. “But we’re now in negotiations as of this morning for at least two of them. So hopefully we’ll sell them shortly.”

Yesterday’s auction was also just the first in a series of events Christie’s has planned over the next five years — and the results represent only a fraction of the value of the foundation’s collection, estimated in tax documents to be worth around $104 million. At the end of the month, Christie’s is conducting a private sale in Hong Kong, followed by one in France in January, and then a stream of online sales beginning in February.

Wachs said he hopes that this international approach will dispel fears that the foundation’s move will dilute the Warhol market, as collector Alberto Mugrabi previously predicted. Either way, it seems be good news for bargain hunters. The happy couple that bought the Warhol collage had good reason to smile — they got their picture for just $20,000, more than half off the estimated price.

SALE: Post-War/Contemporary Art      

LOCATION: Rago Arts and Auction Center

DATE: November 17

ABOUT: This weekend, New York’s art scene will be winding down from two blockbuster weeks of contemporary, impressionist, and modern art auctions. But for those buyers with serious stamina, a number of 20^th-century gems from the Lydia Winston Malbin collection can be found across the river on Saturday, at Rago Arts and Auction Center in Lambertville, NJ.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Detroit-born Malbin traveled to Europe frequently to collect contemporary art, with a special love for the Italian Futurists. Sotheby’s sold much of the late collector’s trove in a $74-million sale in 1990, and now Rago is offering another 18 works in its 357-lot postwar and contemporary sale, expected to bring in about $350,000 to $500,000. (The auction’s overall presale estimate is $3.1 million to $4.5 million).

There’s a selection of offerings by Jean Arp, ranging from one of his bronze “Ganymède” sculptures to two abstract works on paper that were previously part of the Tristan Tzara collection. And, of course, there’s no shortage of Italians: a 1959 oil painting by Piero Dorazio is on offer for $50,000 to $70,000, while a small shadowbox by the artist is going for $5,000 to $7,000, and a black abstraction and a small bronze sculpture by Pietro Consagra are being offered for $8,000 to $10,000 each.

That’s just the Malbin collection. In the larger afternoon sale, there’s a four-way tie for the top spot including a 1965 painting by Bridget Riley, an Isamu Noguchi soapstone sculpture, and two of the bronze Arps — all for $60,000 to $80,000.

Sounds like a fine time for a day trip.

Greg Chait, the man behind the California cashmere label The Elder Statesman, was awarded the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund prize last night, winning $300,000, business mentoring, and tons of publicity. The bearded Southern California hipster joins the ranks of former winners Proenza Schouler, Alexander Wang, and Sophie Theallet — so he’s certainly in good company. Who is the relatively unknown Chait and what are his clothes like? Here, we break it down for you:

Who: Greg Chait, 33

Homebase: Los Angeles

The Label: The Elder Statesman

Established: 2007

The Story: After receiving a cashmere blanket as a gift a decade ago, Chait became obsessed, collecting blankets from far-flung places like Scotland and Ethiopia. But he could never find the perfect one for himself. “It had to be utilitarian as well as the ultimate in terms of luxury, so I found a collective in Canada doing handspun wool and they were working a little bit with cashmere and I asked them, ‘Can you create a really heavy gauged yarn for me?’” he said in an interview last year with For the Record, a newspaper distributed during Paris Men’s Fashion Week. The collective said yes, and Chait began making blankets. The owner of Los Angeles luxury retailer Maxfields got word and placed an order. The Elder Statesman was born soon after, and eventually expanded into luxury sweaters and accessories.

The Look: The artisanal label is known for exquisitely handcrafted thick chunky sweaters, comfy, oversized cardigans, warm blankets, soft scarves, and knit caps made from luxurious cashmere that is hand-dyed and handspun on century-old machines. Think Loro Piana quality mixed with an effortless California cool vibe. Chait also works with other fine materials, including alpaca wool and buffalo horn (for glasses).

Where to Find It: Barneys, Mr Porter, Aloha Rag, L’Eclaireur

Click on the slideshow to see designs from The Elder Statesman.

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PARIS — Photographer Corinne Mercadier has always had a preference for  solitary, shadowed landscapes — where, as in dollhouses or daydreams, scenarios might play them out in just a few mysterious moments, without any final resolution. Set against infinite horizons and dark skies, her stretches of deserted planes are marked with levitating objects and enigmatic figures, awaiting some unknown purpose.

And though the photographer has in recent years traded in her old Polaroid SX70 for a digital camera and Photoshop, newer forms of technique haven’t changed the distinctive style of Mercadier’s work. As evidenced in her two most recent series, “Black Screen” and “Solo” (on view at Paris gallery Filles du Calvaire), the photographer is still very much preoccupied by the mysteries lingering where time and space are uncertain.   

In her show “Devant un champ obscur,” through December 1, the series “Solo” presents us with studies that evoke the surrealism of Magritte or de Chirico. Anonymous-seeming figures with unclear connection are assembled on flat terrestrial planes, which seem to stretch to infinity beneath low-hung dark skylines; miscellaneous objects are suspended in the air, as if thrown in the air and stopped abruptly in flight. It’s a land of labyrinths, of rectangles and spheres. The choreography is silent and immobile, but the viewer can also sense its past and future movement.

“The photographic movement is interesting to me because it registers what the eye hasn’t seen,” Mercadier recently told an interviewer. The images of “Solo” do just this — with their mysterious scenarios frozen in time, the viewer has no choice but to analyze every detail, questioning their meaning and the pervasive suggestion of absence.   

The images of “Black Screen,” photographed within abandoned spaces and transfigured with positive-negative image reversal, appear less as captured moments than they do a succession of epiphanies. Bare-stripped interiors, with cracked walls and peeling paint, stand out in stark relief. Phosphorescent discarded objects, such as a pile of plates or disassembled bed, take on a magical-seeming significance, appearing to glow from internal light sources. In contrast to the stilled time of “Solo,” Mercadier here casts a spell upon an uninhabited landscape, using a magician’s wand to revive their elements of past time. Where the human eye might only see dereliction, the artist has created an enchanted world.

To see images by Corinne Mercadier from her show at Filles du Calvaire, click on the slideshow. 

A century ago Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, occupied with the development of Cubism, hit upon a technique of humble origins but resounding consequences. Once let loose, collage was so perfectly adaptable to other ways of thinking about art that it has been reworked and repurposed nearly every decade since. What is at the heart of this affinity for the medium in the modern age? To be sure, collage’s felicitous juxtapositions and rude incongruities are in step with the rise of mass culture and its relentless competition for our attention. On a darker note, maybe this method of creation that uniquely depends on a destructive act — wrenching and cutting bits of content out of context — was just what was needed to represent the turbulent 20th century. And the recasting of the romantic artist as scavenger and recycler seems apt in our post-heroic era. Whatever its root, the attraction continues. Contemporary collage has taken over l’Espace de l’Art Concret, in Mouans-Sartoux, France, through November 4, and has been the focus of a range of recent gallery shows, a few of which are cited in this short history of the innovators who used the technique to construct a whole new art.

Georges Braque

Cutting and pasting, of course, predates Cubism. But it was the Parisian Cubists who first imported it from the realm of handicraft into the fine arts. (The technique’s name derives from the French papier collé, or “glued paper.”) No one is sure exactly who made the first snip. A case has been made for Picasso’s integration of a piece of oilcloth printed with a cane pattern in Still Life with Chair Caning; others argue for Braque’s use of wood-grain wallpaper in Fruit Dish with Glass. Both works are from 1912. Despite the long-recognized importance of this period to the development not only of collage but also of modernism, fine examples can still be had.

Kurt Schwitters

A leading Dadaist, tone poem composer, sometime typographer, and restless innovator, Schwitters introduced the use of collage as a snapshot of the everyday. He integrated scraps of cardboard, bits of text, and ticket stubs found in the street, their juxtapositions emblematic of life’s chance encounters. Newsprint was not an illusionary stand-in for a newspaper in a composed still life, but a piece of the quotidian right there on the picture plane. He liberated the letters merz from an ad for Kommerzund Privatbank and pasted the nonsense syllable on an early work, then went on to apply the term to hundreds of collages, paintings, and even an ever-changing environment of found objects bound together with plaster.

Varvara Stepanova

Though too often under-represented in its history, women were central to Constructivism in Russia. Stepanova created fabrics and clothes for the proletariat and designed some of the period’s most arresting graphics for posters and publications, working alongside her husband, Alexander Rodchenko. Collage played a key role in the development of the movement’s style, allowing for a mix of clean typography, active figures and engaging faces cut from photos, and thrusting geometric forms emblematic of the relentless march of Communism. Even in non-propaganda work, Stepanova’s shrewd ability to evoke motion on a static page shines.

Hannah Hoch

“Höch’s work anticipates the feminist observation that the personal is political,” observes Jane Kallir, codirector of New York’s Galerie St. Etienne, which specializes in the art of Weimar Germany. As the most prominent woman in the male-dominated Dada circle, Höch had plenty of reason to take up the cause of women’s rights, but her art was never didactic. As Kallir notes, Höch was able to bring a subjectivity to even overt political topics that grounded her art without dulling its bite. And she embraced a wide range of aesthetics, deploying absurdist social parodies, nearly abstract graphic experiments, and Surrealist dreamscapes with equal aplomb.

John Heartfield

As with collage itself, the question of exactly who invented the offshoot technique of photomontage is still debated. Heartfield often gets credit, and in any case he was an undisputed master, able to join pieces from various photos into balanced compositions perfectly calibrated to skewer the powers that be. Regularly arrested by Weimar authorities and, like Schwitters, forced to flee his native Germany following the Nazis’ rise to power, Heartfield was a devoted Communist, yet he steered clear of the Constructivists’ earnest celebration of the working class. While his art addresses social inequity, it also drips with acid humor.

Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg’s best-known work, from the “Combines” he introduced in the mid 1950s to the later screen- prints made of layered imagery lifted from mass media, derives directly from early experiments with collage proper. Works made in 1952 and 1953 already reveal him to be expert at editing visuals from the world around him. These spare pieces often join just a couple of pictures taken from old books with odd pieces of cloth. The addition of an occasional brushstroke of paint — and in one case feathers — now seems to foreshadow the “Combines.” The iconography steers clear of the overtly surreal, but hints at an intensely personal symbolism reminiscent of that of Joseph Cornell.

Addie Herder

Putting to use her keen eye for graphic design, Herder built collages whose evocations of architectural facades and stage sets veer into the realm of abstraction. They are striking for her ability to treat monumental subjects at an intimate size as well as to infuse formalism with a sense of play. Where many collagists rely on figurative imagery to engage viewers, Herder’s work delights the eye with mere juxtapositions of shapes and variations of color. Herder honed her compositional skills working as a commercial artist, and although she never took to Pop, her studio was a meeting place for Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and others who would take up techniques from both collage and commercial art.

Martha Rosler

The Pop art movement famously came into being with a collage: Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956, depicting a chockablock living room that mocks the media’s selling of the good life. A decade later, in a sort of hybrid of Hamilton and Heartfield, Rosler began an angry and witty series critiquing both the Vietnam War and the way civilians consumed easy doses of conflict in the newspaper alongside furniture advertisements. The photomontages in her “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” series place soldiers and casualties of war front and center in elegant interiors.

Betye Saar

At the heart of Saar’s practice is collage’s intrinsic potential to reanimate history. The artist has for decades scoured flea markets for remnants linked to the fractured story of African-Americans, which she then gives a new life. Mamie dolls are recast as heroines in works of assemblage — the three-dimensional sibling of collage, of which Saar is also a master — while collages create new context for book jackets worn down by readers’ hands, illustrations of slave ships excised from history primers, and anonymous portraits rescued from family albums. Manifestly narrative, these artworks fuse the individual and the archetypal in the manner of literature.

Arturo Herrera

If fragmentation and augmentation are collage’s twin operating principles, Herrera clearly favors the former. While he was known early on for taking cartoons as his starting point, one always sensed he felt a purely formal attraction to the curve of a line. If the source material then seemed beside the point, it is now largely invisible. As he has become more indiscriminate, cutting bits of imagery from all manner of media, including his own paintings, his knife work has become more severe, often producing little more than a jagged patch of red or blue. Yet when seen assembled in a mural-size abstract composition, these bits become a riot of color and more than the sum of its parts.

Wangechi Mutu

A Machine for Luddites, 1983, shown in “Intimate Scale: The Art of Addie Herder,” at Pavel Zoubok, New York, 2012. Augmentation is central to Mutu’s method, which typically integrates elements from fashion magazines, pornography, and documentary photography with ethereal watercolors. The results are surreal, hybridized female figures that are beautiful and monstrous, delicate and fierce, vulnerable and assertive. While the artist has said her aesthetic developed in response to her early encounters with sexism and oppression in her native Kenya, these figures embody a universal experience. Through augmentation, Mutu makes visible the transcendent processes by which the individual builds up her identities, lays on her defenses, and ultimately constructs her self.

Ryan McNamara

Donning the mantle of Allan Kaprow, who called his famous Happenings “action collages,” Ryan McNamara creates unscripted performances, often enlisting the help of whomever may be around. For his recent show at Elizabeth Dee, the young artist turned Kaprow’s coinage on its head, inviting gallery visitors during the first weeks to enact various situations, then in the final weeks displaying props collaged with photos from the actions. Silhouetted figures in garish colors prance and jump on a desk, a lamp, a sheet of wood paneling. Although collage is not central to McNamara’s identity as an artist, the spirited works show that after 100 years the technique provides artists with fresh inspiration.

This article was published in the October 2012 issue of Art+Auction.

To see images from select artists, click on the slideshow. 

There are only two weeks left to snap up a piece of Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière before the designer parts ways with the legendary fashion house. On November 15 a handful of Ghesquière’s cuddly creations will go up for sale at Christie’s as part of the Designer Pudsey benefit auction, which was curated by Love editor Katie Grand. Ghesquière reimagined Pudsey, the cute yellow bear mascot of British charity BBC Children in Need, five times, using the colorful prints from his spring 2008 Flora collection. If you’re not going to be in London tomorrow, don’t worry — you can also place a bid online at designerpudsey.co.uk.

Visit Artinfo.com/fashion for more fashion and style news.

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To decant a wine is to transfer the contents from the bottle to a glass receptacle. The reason is either to enhance the quality or drinkability of a wine or to give it a better look or appearance. The most basic use of the decanting principle is the...

The selection of an all-electric vehicle as Car of the Year is a first for Motor Trend and Tesla’s Model S beat out other finalists such as the Porsche Boxster, BMW 3-series, Lexus GS, and Subaru BRZ, Tesla Motors said. Motor Trend said Tesla faced tough...

It was about 20 minutes after the National Book Awards after party was scheduled to start at Cipriani 55 that we remember being glad that the event was held in the middle of Wall Street. Normally this thought would never have crossed our mind, but with it being very, very cold – we were hidden beneath our peacoat until we stumbled inside the venue – we were glad to be surrounded by the colossally tall buildings that blocked the cold gusts of wind.

Even better than waiting outside, though, was being inside the dimly-lit interior of the of the former bank building. We’re not sure how things looked during the actual ceremony but by the time we got in, it was a wasteland of a fancy dinner, nothing left but empty wine glasses, rumpled napkins, and the odd reporter rushing through their award show recap (Louise Erdrich won for fiction, Katherine Boo for non-fiction, David Ferry for poetry, and William Alexander for young people’s literature), so they could, presumably, make it upstairs to the actual party.

The party, held on the second floor balcony, was loud, bright, and endearingly wholesome, closer to a wedding reception than anything else. Many of the evening’s more distinguished guests left as soon as the ceremony ended, only to be replaced by the bright, young, pretty things of New York’s rapidly shrinking literary world who were dressed in their going-out-best, trying in vain to be heard over DJ Rabbi Darkside.

“There’s a lot of awkwardness,” we heard one woman say, and yes, at first there was. But as the night wore on, and more and more of the free drinks were imbibed, the stiffness of the crowd gradually dissipated, replaced by drunken chatter and writhing dancers elbowing for space on the temporary parquet dance floor. Was the dancing good? No (as one anonymous insider told us, “You never see worse dancing than at the fucking National Books Awards.”), but the crowd was having fun, screaming along to Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love” or the Temptations “My Girl.”

We tried to do our reportedly due diligence, attempting to talk to the faces we recognized, but time and time again it was made clear to us that no one was interested. “No!” fiction finalist Dave Eggers told us, in the nicest way possible, when we asked him for a minute of his time. “It’s a party,” he added. “Have fun!” We set off for new real estate, carefully avoiding the packed dance floor to mingle with writers, editors, and the occasional literary-minded rapper (Das Racist’s Heems) or shy-seeming TV actor (Alex Karpovsky). Surprisingly, or maybe not, the talk was rarely about books, people instead chatting about old roommates, basketball jerseys, or how this party compared to previous ones. “Last year I was invited, but this year I found out how much more fun it is when you crash the party,” an agent, who will remain nameless, told us.

As stated on the invite, the night came to a prompt end at 1 a.m. Though the crowd had thinned considerably over the last hour, there were still 70 or so stragglers left. The coat check, a scene of chaos at the beginning of the evening, was remarkably efficient at a time when most of those left would’ve been fine with an excuse to hang out a bit longer. Nevertheless, jackets were zipped and the crowd shuffled out into the cold.

Click on the slideshow to see images from the National Book Awards after party. 

NEW YORK — Two Metropolitan Museum of Art members filed a lawsuit in the New York State Supreme Court yesterday alleging that the historically free, public institution has been deceiving visitors into paying entry fees.

A (recently raised) fee of $25 is the museum's “recommended” rate, but plaintiffs Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson say this detail isn't listed on several of its websites, and only in “fine and tiny print” on signs near the cash registers. Lawyers argue that the museum has been committing consumer fraud by requiring everyone to pay at least something — despite an 1893 statute mandating that the museum maintain a “pay what you wish” policy in exchange for receiving government funding.

“It’s an absolute travesty,” said Nicholson in a press release. “The museum was designed to be open to everyone, without regard to their financial circumstances — a public library of art and culture to enrich the lives of the citizenry. But instead, the museum has been converted into an elite tourist attraction to be enjoyed only by those who can afford to pay expensive and illegal admission fees.”

Met publicist Harold Holzer told the New York Post today that the complaint is “ludicrous and outrageous,” adding that, “The suggested admission is $25, but it’s not mandatory. It’s on the signage.”

The lawsuit cites a survey of 360 visitors to the Met, in which 85 percent didn't know museum admission was free.

Nicholson and Grunewald are seeking a court order to immediately prevent the museum from requiring entry fees, and to reopen the former Central Park entrance. Their — somewhat murky — logic has it that the entrance was closed to cut the number of ticket takers they would have to employ, which proves that the museum only aims to maximize profit at the expense of accessibility.

The exhibition celebrating Valentino Garavani — the designer who made the red dress famous — opens in London at Somerset House on November 29. “Valentino: Master of Couture” will feature 130 works of couture, including the striking red gown Anne Hathaway wore to the 2011 Oscars, along with the white one Julia Roberts had on when she won her Academy Award for “Erin Brockovich” in 2001. Click on the slideshow for a sneak peek of the elegant frocks that will be on display in designer’s retrospective, which will be on view through March 3, 2013.

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EMERGING is a regular column where ARTINFO spotlights an up-and-coming artist.

Martin Roth is as much caretaker as creator for his art, in which tufts of grass grow along the labyrinthine patterns of Persian rugs and his studio is transformed into an aviary for finches complete with trees for perching, all viewable through a peephole in the door. His installations and renegade interventions, like releasing a goldfish in the Chinese garden court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or living with sheep as an “artist’s retreat,” are reactions against our relationship to the natural world that has been supplanted by an idea of nature.

Born in the Austrian countryside in 1977, Roth moved to New York at 19, and eventually graduated with an MFA from Hunter College last December. He now keeps a studio in Long Island City “full of plants, and birds are flying around it,” as he told ARTINFO. During a 2010 open studio event, he raised baby ducklings to allegorically explore how in his studio he “nurtures good ideas until they become art works” (and how at an open studio event he “often felt like an animal in the zoo”). However, he sees his real studio as the parks of New York, especially the Olmsted & Vaux-designed Central Park, which he states is “like walking in an image of nature.”

This state of in-between is central to his Persian rugs on which grass grows “on the ‘dust of history’.” They were inspired by philosopher Michel Foucault’s examination of “heterotopias,” spaces that both exist and do not exist. Since the designs of carpets were first patterned after gardens, Foucault wrote that “the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space.” Roth’s mobile rug installation has traveled to New York, Mexico, and a medieval castle in Graz, Austria for a May 2012 solo exhibition with Reinisch Contemporary. For that show, entitled “Second Nature,” Roth also flooded the floor of Reinisch’s gallery space and released 30 fish to swim through the water while life went on as normal around them. (Roth did say that he bought the gallery attendants rain boots.)

Roth is continuing to cross these boundaries between art and nature with a March 2013 solo exhibition at Louis B. James in New York’s Lower East Side, where he exhibited the Persian rug works in March 2012. For the upcoming show, he plans to focus on natural sounds, which he previously explored by releasing flies and crickets to alter the ambient soundscape. Currenly, he is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow’s “Billboard International” in Poland. All of his work has an appealing chaos to it — each project’s actual life of its own can flourish into unexpected moments of natural intervention. 

Click here for a slideshow of Martin Roth’s art.

For the uninitiated viewer, “Massimo Scolari: The Representation of Architecture,” a retrospective show now in its final week at the Cooper Union, appears only vaguely connected to the discipline with which it engages. With over 160 drawings, paintings, watercolors, and models gleaned from more than four decades of work, the show is a rigorous survey of the Italian architect’s elusive vision. In the late 20th century, as modernism frayed into its many iterations of postmodernism, Scolari (b. 1943) was recognized for his turn to the surreal and the subjective, producing a wealth of provocative paintings, sculptures, and texts instead of building. Beyond scripting a synopsis of an extraordinary oeuvre, this retrospective reinvigorates an important dialogue, challenging the dogmas that gird visual culture now more than ever.

Curated by Scolari himself, the show begins with works from the architect’s early career in the late 1960s and 1970s, when he first distinguished himself with his obstinate refusal to build. Sketches of women greet visitors at the start of the exhibition, followed by colorful tableaus that cobble together equal parts architectural and non-architectural imagery. True to its name, the show spans all the way to the most recent paintings of this still prolific (and still un-built) architect. The welter of thumbnail-sized watercolors, construction diagrams, paintings, models, and photographs is almost dizzying, tamed only slightly by the cadence of the slate-gray wall displays and perpendicular partitions that frame the works.

What is immediately felt is the foreignness that pervades Scolari’s work. His compositions aggregate familiar forms and images but empty them of precise meaning and function. Though easy to dismiss as nonsensical, these visions accomplish the difficult task of constructing architectures that eschew historical allusions. In painted and sculptural form, they refuse to settle into any established frameworks. Stairs appear as both the extruded volumes of a modern plan and the crenellations of a medieval fortress. Pitched roofs become winged gliders, and bridges lead nowhere, abruptly transforming into cantilevered eaves. Scolari’s landscapes conflate anachronistic histories and sprout industrial and urban features at distorted scales.

Alternative perspectives emerge as an obvious hallmark of the architect’s work. His paintings revive the conflicted visual logic of medieval illuminated manuscripts, flouting the accepted hegemony of one-point perspective. This is seen most clearly in “Gate for a Maritime City,” a 1979-80 project realized in both painted and sculptural form. Scolari’s Gate is a fiercely symmetrical brick portal constructed in unsettling axonometric angles. Represented this way, the image challenges the accepted truths of symmetry, confusing reality with illusion.

Meanwhile, “27 Models of Laconic Architecture,” a collection of plaster models, exhibit a playful, Palladian exploration of form. Arranged on a broad red pedestal, the white models appear wonderfully abstract, casting sharply defined shadows on each other. Gutted of function, Scolari’s forms rescript architecture as an autonomous visual language, one that need not justify itself with legible, external meanings.

Like his contemporary Aldo Rossi, Scolari abandons the objective reality upon which Modernism tried and failed to build its foundation. The modern movement’s attempt to make sense of the world, to digest history and all its phenomena into fixed understandings, comes to a staggering halt in Scolari’s work. It seems only fitting, then, that the show refuses to clarify exactly where his 45-year trajectory has led.

Like the motif of a winged glider that recurs in his work, the architect’s oeuvre is difficult to pin down. What his fantastical theoretical projects do, however, is question the conventions of contemporary practice. Scolari reveals ways in which perception informs our understanding of the world. Thus the representation of architecture, as Scolari suggests, can have a profound influence on actual built form. Instead of aspiring to graft falsely utopian visions onto reality — an effort endemic to contemporary practice — architectural representation can take on an even greater task, that of challenging the basis of reality itself.

To view more images from "Massimo Scolari: The Representation of Architecture, 1967 - 2012," click the slideshow.