The means with which a piece of wall-based art is fixed to an architectural support for exhibition display has taken many forms, particularly since the easel picture became a dominant format for painting in the seventeenth century. Using the exhibitionary environments of galleries and museums as a point of focus, this research will explore the relationship between art and architecture through a study of fixing systems and walls. Fixing systems are broadly defined here as those physical support mechanisms used to hold works of art in space for display, the most obvious example being hanging hardware attached to a frame and suspended from a wall with screws, hooks and wire.
However, from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day, there has been a proliferation of novel fixing systems designed by architects and architecture-adjacent disciplines. These systems mediate the literal and conceptual space between art and architecture: from the cantilevers used to separate paintings from the curved walls of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York since 1959, to Lina Bo Bardi’s unique glass easels designed for the São Paulo Museum of Art in 1968.
Project members: Jessica Spresser, PhD Candidate