Louise Aline Barnsdall’s Hollyhock House was intended as a temple of artistic invention. But the oil heiress and patron of the arts, who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design it, found the architect so infuriating she fired him, forcing project manager Rudolph M. Schindler to finish the difficult work, Schindler brought in Richard Neutra to help design the garden terrace. Barnsdall never completed the full plan for the project. She only lived in the house for a few years – her dissatisfaction made it less a temple of art or architecture and more of opposing forces.
“Entanglements: Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman at Hollyhock House” responds to the site’s story of tension and denial. The first contemporary art intervention staged inside the Mayan Revival house, the show was proposed by the artist couple, who were inspired by the history of the house of great minds against the current . Designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2019, the exhibition had to be set up lightly, so that even the most monumental works could be quickly removed without leaving a trace. The meaning is that Hollyhock remains a place of counterforces: by welcoming these works, the building reveals how unwelcoming it is for them.
Bonnet and Silverman respond differently to these monumental frictions. With pieces like Tangled (dining table), 2023, Silverman features ceramic vessels fused together through the firing process, suggesting individuals forever united by difficult circumstances. His carvings, which were fired with pieces of wood from the property’s olive trees, also feature enamels made by the artist with shipwrecks salvaged from the Pacific Ocean, which the house overlooks. The work’s placement is informed by historic photos showing the original furnishings, art, and decorative items—purchased at Wright’s instigation—which have since disappeared. Bonnet’s jewel-toned paintings of demented hands, such as golden hollyhock, 2022, glow in the dark, man-made surroundings of the building under low ceilings. Its characteristic style, which alludes to the technique of Baroque painting without quite nailing it, is complemented by the grotesque flourishes of its forms. Like the love children of R. Crumb and Vermeer, her subjects are unconstrained by the logic of traditional human anatomy as she shapes her figures more by violent force than technical precision – flesh is pressed, twisted, gripping . As in the construction of the house, Bonnet’s excessively aggressive hands shake with very contrasting agendas.
