In the past years, Chicago-based artist Assaf Evron – 2024 Edith Farnsworth House artist-in-residence – has explored the tension between architecture, nature, and representation. Collage for the Edith Farnsworth House is the fifth project in an ongoing series of interventions in buildings and interiors designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The interventions are based on the architect’s paper collages, made as preparatory pieces for his designs. For this iteration, Evron has designed a 500 square foot photographic print for the southern glass façade of the house. The print’s composition is based on a Georges Braque painting, who’s art was integrated into Mies own collages. Since the 1930’s in his American period Mies used photographs of landscapes, natural and man-made building material, and artwork reproductions for his collages to negotiate and articulate architecture and interior design as a modern way of living. Evron is exploring and expanding Mies’s own strategy of collage, applying it to the architect’s finished buildings. In Collage for the Edith Farnsworth House, representation of architecture collapses into the actual architecture, where imagery, transparency, and reflections respond both to the historical context of the house but also to the immediate natural environment.

Other projects in this ongoing series have taken place at the McCormick House (2019), the Esplanade Apartments (2019), S.R. Crowne Hall at IIT (2022), and The Arts Club of Chicago (2023). This exhibition and related programming will be held in conjunction with the 2024 edition of EXPO Chicago and the Farnsworth House’s spring opening program.