Trotter&Sholer is thrilled to collaborate with Galerie Nicolas Robert to present Maison en Bord de Mer, a solo exhibition by acclaimed Canadian artist, Lorna Bauer. This exhibition builds on Bauer’s longstanding practices of photography and glass working. Conceptually, the show is inspired by E.1027, a modernist villa designed and built in the late 1920s by Eileen Gray and John Badovici, who ultimately retained sole ownership of the house. Bauer is deeply inspired by the site’s architecture and complex history, and Gray’s place in both.
In 2017, when Bauer visited the house, it was largely publicly associated with French artist and writer, Le Corbusier, a friend of Badovici, who painted large colorful murals on the home’s white walls. This infuriated Gray, who considered it an act of vandalism. Bauer understands this narrative through the lens of a feminist critique, echoing the work of critic Rowan Moore, who suggested that Le Corbusier’s intervention in the house reflected his need to assert dominance and his unwillingness to accept that such beauty could have been created by a woman.
The complexity of this deeply personal story created questions of authorship, memory, and mythology for Bauer. In this exhibition, Bauer’s authorship is uncontested, and it pays homage to a woman who was so handily separated from her work, both physically and in terms of the home’s identity.
The exhibition includes hand-blown borosilicate glass sculptures, hand-mirrored glass reliefs, analogue photographs, and sculptural references to Gray’s furniture and lighting designs. Bauer’s hand mirrored surfaces create both visual and conceptual instability and suggest fragmented memory, imperfect reflection and contested narratives. The silver nitrate
used in the mirroring process connects to Bauer’s photographic practice which relies on the same chemical compound. Her glass-blown bricks physically support glass sculpture. Bauer is asserting that she can create delicate beauty and buttress it herself.
Bauer approaches E.1027 as both a real place and a kind of psychological and symbolic space shaped by overlapping histories, projections, tensions, and fictions. Infusing this narrative into her work allows Bauer to firmly reject the idea of erasure, particularly the erasure of women in their own stories and work.
