The Music of Buildings by Vishwa Shroff

About

Shroff is an urban forager of architectural motifs. She extracts her carefully picked observations from buildings and sites, interior and exterior, and transforms them into minimal yet intriguing drawings. Her works are primarily documentations of her collecting experience, and memory. They serve as a document to a journey that she carries out on foot through the city, and within it, chosen spaces. She acknowledges the ephemeral nature of her movement and presence within these sites, and incorporates it in her drawings in a nuanced, uncanny and striking way. Intrinsic to Shroff’s practice is her process of walking, studying, observing and drafting. Her works obediently mirror the tactile quality of the construction materials being studied. 

In an excerpt from the accompanying catalogue essay, Hannes Schüpbach notes, “Vishwa Shroff’s drawings of architecture don’t duplicate what is there; they render what she sees. And she gives us what she sees in what is there in a form that is her own and that we can share. When looking at her drawings, we experience her, the artist's vision and the matrix of her seeing as it leaves a mark on our own…There is a strong emphasis on objecthood in these drawings and their material realisation. The “domestic” — that which relates to the house — in these depictions is not the life in the house but, in very concrete ways, the life of the house. Its liveliness in proportion and execution, but also in its historic persistence. A life in time over time, which Vishwa Shroff’s portraiture takes beyond time.”