Helmut Lang showcases his provocative sculptures in a modernist Los Angeles home

Helmut Lang, artist and former fashion designer, has opened a new show of works at MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, the Los Angeles home designed by modernist architect Rudolph Schindler in 1921-22 and run as a satellite of the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.

‘What remains behind’ comprises a series of sculptural works situated among the rooms of the minimalist house. The works harness unexpected materials of mattress foam, wax, resin, shellac and latex; the foam, drenched in the other materials, is contorted and bound into forms resembling closed fists as well as other bodily elements.

There is a visceral quality to the sculptures, recalling sticky cake or wet sponge, while their shapes oscillate between the sensual and the deformed, toying with desire and disgust. Titles such as ‘Fist I’ (2015–17) and ‘Prolapse II’ (2024) reflect this, while making clear the sexual narratives at play. The sculptures are accompanied by two small wall pieces, in which the materiality of shellac, plastic and wax is centred, exalted and framed.

The works were not created for the Schindler House, but the curation from Neville Wakefield – known for his site-specific approaches, including as artistic director of Desert X, and a longtime collaborator of Lang’s – powerfully connects the sculptures to the setting.

Arranged across five rooms, the works and their amber-brown hues reflect the home’s redwood frame, wooden panelling and striking copper fireplaces. ‘The scale, coloration and textures of the sculptures play off the physicality and histories of the house, which itself has always felt to me to be rather sculptural and bears the traces of its making, as well as its inhabitants,’ says Beth Stryker, director of the MAK Center.

The domesticity of the old mattress foam and its contortion begins to symbolise the way Rudolph Schindler radically rethought the nature of the home with this West Hollywood house. He designed the propositional, communal structure to be shared by two families – himself and his wife, and their friends Clyde and Marian Chace – with rooms flowing into one another and the outdoors, and often detached from set functions.

The house is a ‘storied repository of the many social, sexual and intellectual experiments that connected the new architectural forms to the lifestyles of those who built and inhabited them,’ Wakefield tells Wallpaper*. ‘Just as many of the physical barriers between inside and outside were broken down, so too were the psychological barriers that separate our internal and external conditions. It’s an idea that is echoed in the sculptures.’

The Austrian architect’s house eludes a fixed rooting in time, blending radical modernism with ancient Japanese design; traditional wood with innovative concrete. The sculptures of Lang, another Austrian creative, equally appear timeless: somehow both contemporary and prehistoric. Both artworks and architecture ’exist in a liminal space that is a threshold between past and present,’ says Wakefield.

This slippery grasp on time, where past and present coalesce, reflects Lang’s preoccupation with the notion of memory that the show’s title hints at; particularly the use of materials that feel imbued with past narratives. ‘Before it was sculpture, the mattress foam supported human bodies,’ says Wakefield. ‘Infused with this intangible memory, the reformed material speaks to the tension between the weight of the past and the promise of renewal.’

Ideas of memory, absence and presence – particularly in the domestic context – have also taken on new poignancy in the context of Los Angeles, in light of the devastating wildfires that ravaged the city this January. Materials indeed hold the stories of the past – but only if time allows them to survive.

‘Helmut Lang: What remains behind’ is on show at MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles until 4 May 2025

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