Mimicking Ruined Materials

About

These works do not depict ruin; they perform it. Their surfaces look weathered, burnt, crumbling or excavated, so a new object carries the look of age and loss. The taste has deep roots in garden design: 18th-century English landscape parks built sham ruined abbeys and temples, and at Kew a deliberately broken Roman-style arch went up in 1759. Hubert Robert painted an imagined ruin of the Louvre's Grande Galerie in the 1790s.

Modern artists turned the effect towards history and memory. Anselm Kiefer works straw, ash, lead and cracked paint into scorched surfaces, and Hans Josephsohn's brass figures have the worn, lumpy presence of weathered rock. Peter Buggenhout assembles dust-covered forms that resemble debris, and Daniel Arsham casts everyday objects in volcanic ash, crystal and similar materials so they look like finds from a future excavation. Look for damage that has been made rather than suffered.