April 2025
Neville Wakefield
on Helmut Lang
A conversation between Ricky Lee and the curator Neville Wakefield on art, architecture, and the emotional and material resonance of Helmut Lang’s sculptural work presented by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House.
With a short film by Mike Kash, design notes by Dan Golden, and creative direction/production by Saul Appelbaum
Helmut Lang, fist I and fist IV, 2015–17. Courtesy of the artist.
“Significantly, what I tend to avoid is the white cube context of no context,” says Neville Wakefield, the curator and writer known for his innovative approach to art beyond traditional institutional frameworks.
Wakefield’s practice often engages with the legacies of land art, exploring how artworks interact with their environments and the social narratives embedded within architectural space. Helmut Lang: What remains behind, curated by Wakefield and presented at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in the historic Schindler House in Los Angeles, features the sculptural work of artist and former fashion designer Helmut Lang. The show explores themes of memory, transformation, and the psychic imprint of space and material.
In this conversation, Ricky Lee speaks with Wakefield about curating Lang’s enigmatic forms within an iconic site and how past, present, and human presence shape our experience of art and architecture.
Installation video of Helmut Lang: What remains behind at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House, Los Angeles, 2025. Short film by Mike Kash.
Ricky Lee: What are some of the themes and topics that you explore in your curatorial practice?
Neville Wakefield: I’m interested in how art behaves outside of institutional contexts. For the most part, with projects such as Desert X [the recurring series of exhibitions presented in California’s Coachella Valley since 2017] or Elevation1049 [site-specific works and performances presented in and around Gstaad, Switzerland]. This has taken the form of an exploration of the legacy of land art. In different ways, they reimagine the motivation that first drove artists to leave the metropolitan confines of what had become the ‘art world’ and take their practice into the unbounded expanses of the American West. But it has also taken other forms, from commissioning artists’ skateboard decks for Supreme to this most recent show with Helmut Lang in the historic Schindler house. Significantly, I tend to avoid the white cube context of no context. Whether responding to landscape and the environmental themes that attend it or architecture and the social themes it invokes, the specificity of context and how that frames the conversation with art is the important thing.
RL: What interests you about Helmut Lang’s work?
NW: Helmut’s work has so many facets that it’s hard to pin it to a single interest. But I think it’s precisely this elusiveness that makes it so engaging. There’s a palpable presence to Lang’s sculptures—something ineffable, felt as much as seen or experienced.
Installation view of Helmut Lang: What remains behind at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House, Los Angeles, 2025. Photography by Joshua Schaedel.
RL: What dialogues emerge between the house’s storied past and Lang’s sculptures?
NW: Just as every experiment in form has behavioral implications, the behaviors that have shaped our past can also give rise to new forms. The Schindler house was a social as much as an architectural experiment, designed quite literally to change how we relate to each other and the space around us. In a way, Lang’s sculpture is an inversion of this. The works invoke a past landscape shaped by emotional and physical trauma, and in doing so, they give rise to new and sometimes unrecognizable forms.
RL: Lang’s work often explores the tension between the visible and invisible, the past and the future. How do the materials he uses—mattress foam, rubber, and wax—embody these dualities, and how do they interact with the Schindler House’s layered histories?
NW: Shindler and Lang work within what appears to be a reductive material vocabulary –redwood, concrete, copper, mattress foam, resin, and steel – but with emotionally maximalist implications. Like the sculptures, the space conveys much more than the ingredients alone. Both carry visible and invisible histories. Both speak to the imprint of the past on the present. These scars of the past are both material and emotional. They exist as the record of their making – the lines and creases in the concrete of the building and the compression and herniations of the sculpture foam – but also as an expression of the psychological forces that contribute to their creation.
Installation view of Helmut Lang: What remains behind at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House, Los Angeles, 2025. Photography by Joshua Schaedel.
Image courtesy of Tag Christof/MAK Center for Art and Architecture.
“There’s a palpable presence to Lang’s sculptures—something ineffable, felt as much as seen or experienced.”
RL: The exhibition text for Helmut Lang: What remains behind mentions the Schindler House’s “psychic architecture,” referring to its history of lifestyle experiments and interpersonal dynamics. How does Lang’s work tap into or reinterpret this intangible aspect of the house?
NW: The imprint of memory is everywhere and central to understanding the show. The architecture, as much as the sculptures, are official responses, both soft and hard. The cast concrete slabs carry the memory of their formation within the small folds, creases, and other imperfections that scar their surfaces. At the same time, the house has witnessed the human memory of its occupants, recorded as an immaterial architecture whose presence can be felt but not seen. All of this is echoed in Lang’s work. Handed-down mattress foam, rubber, and wax became the syntax of a language based on the malleability of material and memory. The material he chooses comes deeply impregnated with the history of its making – the binding, compression, distortion, and expansion that is his process – and its unrecorded past. Before it was sculpture, the mattress foam supported human bodies as they rested, slept, fucked, and woke to the golden promise of fulfillment and the anxiety of uneasy dawns. Infused with this intangible memory, the reformed material speaks to the tension between the weight of the past and the promise of renewal.
RL: Lang’s sculptures often evoke the human body in abstracted, contorted forms. How do these works interact with the Schindler House’s exploration of the boundaries between inside and outside, public and private, and the human experience within architectural space?
NW: As well as being an iconic and ground-breaking structure that presaged and enabled much of the mid-century movement, the Schindler house is also the storied repository of the many social, sexual, and intellectual experiments that connected the new architectural forms to the lifestyles of those who built and inhabited them. Just as many physical barriers between inside and outside were broken down, so too were the psychological barriers that separate our internal and external conditions. It’s an idea that is echoed in the sculptures. Like the house, they exist as physical forms and psychographic statements. The sculptures are the enigmatic manifestation of interior conditions. Like the architecture itself, they exist in a liminal space that is a threshold between past and present, inside and outside, what is concealed and what is revealed.
Installation view of Helmut Lang: What remains behind at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House, Los Angeles, 2025. Photography by Joshua Schaedel.
RL: Time is a recurring theme in Lang’s work, with materials bearing the scars of the past while imagining the future. How does the exhibition address the interplay of time—historical, personal, and architectural—within the Schindler House?
NW: There are multiple registers of time that echo across architecture and sculpture. When we think about historical time, we tend to think about it as static versus lived time as dynamic. Lang’s sculptures often start in the studio but continue to evolve through exposure to the elements and the effects of oxidation. In this sense, they are never static. In the context of the Schindler house, the timeframe is expanded to include not just the time of their making and the personal time that predates it, but also that of the architecture they inhabit and the memories that cling to it.
RL: The sculptures are described as shifting in character depending on the viewer’s perspective, evoking emotions ranging from tragedy to comedy. How does your curation enhance or guide the viewer’s emotional and sensory experience of the works?
NW: The character of these works is as elusive as their origins and meaning. The hope is that the spatial dynamics of the exhibition will reveal and conceal different aspects.
RL: The exhibition text suggests a darker, sexualized undertow in Lang’s work. How does this theme interact with the Schindler House’s own history of challenging societal norms around sexuality and domesticity?
NW: Just as we’ll never really know what took place in the Schindler house, we’ll never know what shaped Lang’s past. But art, like architecture, provides clues, many of which suggest that objects, as much as the spaces that contain them, carry histories of shared and thwarted desires. It’s perhaps no coincidence that ‘For You,’ the most overtly sexual and phallic of the sculptures, is situated in the nursery…
Installation view of Helmut Lang: What remains behind at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House, Los Angeles, 2025. Photography by Joshua Schaedel.
Installation view of Helmut Lang: What remains behind at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House, Los Angeles, 2025. Photography by Joshua Schaedel.
“The works invoke a past landscape shaped by emotional and physical trauma, and in doing so, they give rise to new and sometimes unrecognizable forms.”
Installation view of Helmut Lang: What remains behind at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House, Los Angeles, 2025. Photography by Joshua Schaedel.
RL: Helmut Lang and Rudolph Schindler are Austrian émigrés whose work has shaped cultural landscapes in the U.S. How does this shared heritage influence the exhibition, and what parallels or contrasts do you see between their artistic and architectural practices?
NW: The parallel is fundamentally one of radical experimentation. Both architect and artist use common materials and reductive language to create material opulence of spaces and objects that are rich in history and emotional depth. There’s a kind of palpability that comes with both. There’s also a sense of risk. The Schindler space radicalized behavior through form. Lang’s sculptures speak to certain past disturbances that have manifested in radical forms.
RL: Lang’s work is described as both imagining the future and materializing the past. How do you see this exhibition contributing to contemporary conversations about art, architecture, and the human condition?
NW: Successful art is rarely hermetic or born of a vacuum. Its power to change how we relate to the world directly correlates with its ability to participate in these kinds of conversations. They are the reward of placing art in dialogue with worlds other than its own.
RL: What do you hope visitors take away from this experience?
NW: My hope is that they will come away from it with a renewed curiosity about the ways in which art and architecture shape our lives, both past and present.
Helmut Lang: What remains behind
Curated by Neville Wakefield
February 19—May 4, 2025
MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House
Los Angeles
Helmut Lang lives and works in New York City and on Long Island. He has exhibited since 1996 in Europe and the United States, among others, at the Florence Biennale, Florence (1996); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (1998); The Journal Gallery, New York (2007, 2019); kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2008); The Fireplace Project, Long Island (2011); Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow (2011); Mark Fletcher, New York (2012); DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens (2013); Sperone Westwater, New York (2015, 2017); Dallas Contemporary, Dallas (2016); Sammlung Friedrichshof, Zurndorf (2017); Stadtraum, Vienna (2017); von ammon co, Washington DC (2019); MoCA Westport (2020); and Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Paris (2020) and Los Angeles (2021).
Neville Wakefield is a postmodern writer and curator who is interested in exploring how art behaves outside institutional contexts. As senior curatorial advisor for PS1 MoMA and curator of Frieze Projects, he gained a reputation for challenging the conditions that shape art in both commercial and noncommercial contexts. Explorations of time and space have been a signature part of his practice. He has worked extensively with international institutions, including the Schaulager in Switzerland, where he curated the Matthew Barney retrospective, "Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail," one of the first shows to juxtapose the work of a contemporary artist with that of half a millennium earlier. Space, as it relates to landscape and land art, led him to co-found Elevation1049, a site-specific biennial in Gstaad, Switzerland, while also shaping the recurring Desert X exhibitions in the Coachella Valley region of Southern California, of which he is the Founding Artistic Director. He has also been instrumental in the development and success of Desert X AlUla, taking place in AlUla, northwest Saudi Arabia, home to the country’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, Hegra, along with numerous other initiatives aimed at promoting art in the Gulf region.