Frank Gehry: Fish Lamps, Gagosian

Living architectural legend Frank Gehry’s unusual design show at the Gagosian, Davies Street, runs until December 21st.  Fish Lamps is about just that: light sculptures made from fish-shaped structures, which Gehry describes as ‘the perfect form’. 

The architect is most famous for his work on the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain: an elaborate, sliding silver structure that’s part concept and part luxury liner, and received unanimous praised from architects, critics and the public. His wider work includes the Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles) and a vast body of prestigious buildings throughout the United States and Europe.

But there are no Gehry-designed buildings in London, and despite his celebrity status this master of modernism has received relatively little attention here. (He has, though, recently been hired to collaborate on the redevelopment of the Battersea Power Station.)

Fish Lamps, therefore, is something of a rare exhibition.

Gehry has consistently been interested in the furniture that goes inside the buildings he shapes, and Fish Lamps attends to an emerging motif in Gehry’s aesthetic. So the story goes, he discovered the form in 1983 after accidentally shattered a piece of the then newly-invented ‘ColorCore’ plastic laminate into shards resembling fish scales. 

The lamps here come from 2012, when Gehry resumed his fishy experiments in lamp sculpture. The abiding concern is with flex and form: that ColorCore plastic has been twisted, flattened and pulled into often whimsical, sometimes lyrical figures. There are examples of everything from table lights to chandeliers. These most functional of objects have been transformed into objects of off-the-wall beauty, in which that highly manufactured material – plastic –has been used to interpret natural forms and organic textures. And, like all good architecture and art, these works deals with the lightest material of all: light.

This is a chance to see some very big thinking in very little objects, and a reminder that everyday life can be both functional and extremely beautiful. 

Admission: FREE
Address and map: 17-19 Davies St, London W1K 3DE ‎
Nearest tube: Bond Street