30 May – 25 August 2002

Rita McBride has already created sculptures in many cities throughout the world, including Los Angeles, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin.

Standing invitingly in a white exhibition room is her Arena, a seemingly light-weight structure conveying both dynamism and at the same time a strange anticipation and deficiency. What will happen here? Her streamlined Toyota is made of rattan. What is this form? Where does this material originate? Rita McBride transfers the structure of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye into the inner space of a museum. Among the other works on show are bronze parking-lots, transformations of sites which typify our civilisation.

Rita McBride engages in a discourse with particular places and the feelings experienced in them. In so doing she questions the stereotypes and appraises the egalitarian character of urban planning and architecture, i.e., serialism and standardisation, not omitting the parameter of industrialisation. The artist inquires about the utopian ideas concerning a new world order that these may be masking. Are they perhaps the source of present-day disorientation and loss of identity? By means of her sculptures Rita McBride provides a platform for questions relating to civilisation and social cohesion, and chiefly concerning the embodiment of an idea.