Canadian sculptor and photographer Lorna Bauer wants to help correct the record on E-1027, the century-old modernist villa that Irish designer Eileen Gray built on the French Riviera with dashes of input from her lover, Romanian architect and critic Jean Badovici. “Maison en Bord de Mer,” Bauer’s show at New York-based Trotter & Sholer gallery, conjures the spirit of the architectural icon while playing with memory’s machinations.
E-1027, designed by Eileen Gray, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Photo: Boizet E / Alpaca / Andia / Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
Le Corbusier tried and failed to buy E-1027 from Badovici. Instead, he constructed cabins next door, in 1952, before he died swimming there in 1965. Badovici died in 1956. E-1027 fell into a limbo. This side of the century, though, it has undergone renovations under the care of the French government, and Gray was the subject of a 2024 documentary. She is so regularly rediscovered in terms of E-1027 that writers have implored society time and again to re-focus on her.
Installation view, “Maison en Bord de Mar” by Lorna Bauer at New York-based Trotter&Sholer gallery. Photo: courtesy of Trotter&Sholer.
The works throughout “Maison en Bord de Mer” have been brewing since Bauer’s sole visit to E-1027, in 2017, while in Athens for a show. Bauer spent an afternoon photographing E-1027. “There was a big sign that said ‘Le Corbusier,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Didn’t Eileen Gray build this?’” Bauer realized the situation. “I was kind of offended,” she recalled.
Literal references appear—like the wire vines of glass citrus in Lemon Tree (all works 2026), or the phonograph Bauer blew glass into for Music Corner, which honors E-1027’s feature of the same name. Two sunny windows nearby generally evoke a sense of home. Nestled into one pane is a floral photo.
Lorna Bauer, Palms (2026) Photo: by Atlas Documentation, courtesy of Trotter&Sholer.
Bauer’s latest show advances photography’s obvious parallels with memory. Most of the shots punctuating Bauer’s wall-hanging kiln-formed glass sculptures hail from her E-1027 trip. Palms, for instance, pairs a photo of fronds with embossed ropes—both nods to E-1027. Another floral photo appears in A House Is Not A Machine #1, imprinted with bricks also more loosely evoking homes. In actuality, Bauer cast the kiln’s foundation.
Alas, memory is more like photography—fallible. Many sculptures here feature Bauer’s newfound practice of hand-mirroring, which arose from her work with the peel-apart Polaroid 55 film that photographer Ansel Adams helped develop.
“A lot of the time, because the film is 20 years old or more, it doesn’t work, or you’ll get streaks” Bauer said. “I realized that the main chemical, silver nitrate, is also what is used to mirror glass.”
“Maison en Bord de Mer” is on view at Trotter & Sholer, 168 Suffolk Street, New York, through August 8.
