Object-Type Landscapes

A collection of work by Atlanta-based Architect Anthony Ames will be on display beginning September 14th at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s Kibel Gallery. “Object-Type Landscapes” will include a series of paintings, models and a dinnerware set, both inspired and the inspiration for Ames’ functional yet expressive modernist architecture. A lecture by Ames will open the gallery show on September 14th in Auditorium 0204 at 6:15 pm, followed by a reception.

For more than three decades, architect Anthony Ames has produced a series of paintings that, much like his architecture, are geometric and rational yet intuitive and familiar. Informed by a purist aesthetic, they explore an ambiguity create by deep and shallow, pattern and perspective, and distinction and resemblance.

His beautifully designed houses - represented at the exhibition by nine architectural models - use, reuse and transform ideas borrowed from such architects as Le Corbusier, Richard Meier and Giuseppe Terragni. As Ames has written, "The form of these houses is never novel in the sense they claim to be pure invention.... It is not novelty that interests me but rather the piece thievery and the trail of evidence that it leaves behind."

Also on view are paintings and a porcelain dinnerware set. Ames considers the paintings and designed objects as connected and informing his architectural work through the ideas they share. And ever-present is the landscape, as the inspiration at the beginning of a residential commission or as an element in a painted composition.