Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen loves a challenge. Her chosen canvases are entire buildings, which she methodically dismantles and reconfigures to create mesmerizing, massive installations. For the past decade, Teeuwen has transformed dilapidated, soon-to-be-destroyed structures into highly ordered, ephemeral artworks.
Consider an abandoned home in Gaza, which she turned into a hypnotizing patchwork of intricately stacked concrete blocks; or a former sex shop in Leiden, Holland, which in her hands became a floor-to-ceiling monochromatic composition constructed from bits of broken plaster. Teeuwen preserves her effort in photographs, just before the original building (including her hypnotizing intervention) is demolished once and for all. A selection of these images will soon be on view in Teeuwen’s first-ever U.S. solo show, “Destroyed House,” at Bruce Silverstein Gallery.
“I’m attracted to tasks that seem too large for me—tasks that are almost impossible,” she tells me by phone, from her home in Amsterdam last week. Each “Destroyed House,” as she’s dubbed the series of interventions, can take her as long as a year to create, and is the culmination of a complex process involving permits, large teams of assistants, and the occasional wrecking ball.
