Kingelez’s Building Fantasies
Lucas Adams writes: ‘Every year, it becomes clearer that New York is being reimagined as a city for the rich…It makes the experience of an average commute both dull and tragic: a city without surprises, conspicuously lacking the public and private spaces that inspire and provoke new thoughts and experiences. This state of architectural affairs is what makes MoMA’s current exhibition, “Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams,†such a thrilling divergence. In the late 1970s, the Congolese sculptor Kingelez (1948-2015) began crafting what he called “extreme maquettes,†fantastical buildings constructed out of whatever he could get his hands on. He built most of his “extreme maquettes†in the city of his birth, Kinshasa, capital of the former Zaire, where he lived and worked as a teacher and museum conservator before becoming a full-time artist.’
