In the ongoing series of drawings entitled Ideal Privacy Daniela Brahm records the buildings she has encountered during her travels, and which are examples of an organic, spontaneous, self-generating architectural vitality of the city. The artist creates a type of a private encyclopedia of vernacular, improvised, and „parachute“ architecture.
(text by Tomasz Fudala)

Social critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin knew that “the readable only appears on the surface”. Daniela Brahm in her series Ideal Privacy, (cross) reads the surfaces, the facades of (modernist) architecture. Her work process begins with what you could say an obsessive photographing of everyday, of almost remote examples of this modernist formal vocabulary. As both hunter and gatherer, to stay in the Benjamin metaphor, she sweeps through large cities such as Los Angeles, London and Berlin, but also through the backlands of California and Poland. She is less interested on these visual hunting trips in the big names of legendary urban formulations, and more in their residuum, the anonymous marginal phenomenon, which draw her artistic attention. She transforms these photographic models — the literal definition of icons by the way — into large-scale painting, which in Brahm’s words, “retrieves the modernist utopian aspects from these examples of architecture and transforms these into an idealized form, and with that into the portrait of a character”.
(text by Raimar Stange in the monograph on Daniela Brahm, 2005)

 

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Ideal Privacy / Poland Series
12 drawings, 2007
mixed media on paper, 29.7 x 21 cm

shown in: “Warsaw Under Construction”, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2009