Iconic works from artists including Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Marcel Duchamp and more are reinterpreted as cross-sectional drawings of buildings in this series from Italian architect and illustrator Federico Babina
The collection of 27 images, entitled Archist, playfully interprets the styles and themes of some of the world’s greatest artists including Picasso, Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, and imagines them as architectural forms.
Babina explores the symbiotic relationship between architecture and art, and how they would interact with each other.
“Art and architecture are disciplines that speak and lightly touch each other,” explained Babina. “The definition and function of architecture is changing constantly with the development of contemporary art.”
Sliced images of Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych are spread across rooms decorated in bright colours with two Campbell’s tomato soup cans placed atop the rectangular building.
Damien Hirst’s 2005 piece Wrath of God featuring a shark set in formaldehyde and his colourful dot series Mickey are used to bring a modular building to life.
An eclectic and almost random arrangement of shapes make up the Picasso building, echoing the artist’s dabblings with Cubism.
The artist tried to imagine what a house designed by Dali or a museum designed by Miro might look like.
“A sculpture is like a micro-architecture, a facade can become like a painted canvas and a building can be shaped as in the hands of a skilled sculptor,” he said.
Salvador Dali’s distorted and surrealist shapes are propped up by wooden stilts and feature windows resembling an eye and nostril in Babina’s interpretation.
Marcel Duchamp’s building, meanwhile, draws on the artist’s Roue de Bicyclette, reinterpreting it as a pulley system watched over by the Dadaist’s Fountain urinal.
Richelle Sibolboro 