MoMA Museum of Modern Art

Artist’s Choice: Herzog & de Meuron, Perception Restrained is the seventh exhibition in MoMA’s Artist’s Choice series, in which contemporary artists are invited to select, juxtapose, and comment on works from the Museum’s collection. This is the first in the series to feature architects.

Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are expert at designing spaces for exhibiting and viewing art. Tate Modern, Walker Art Center, and the De Young Museum are just a few examples of their brilliant designs for diverse collections. For their examination of MoMA’s collection, they offer a counterpoint to the collection galleries that challenges how art is categorized and displayed. Bringing together painting, sculpture, design, photography, and film, the installation draws surprising spatial relationships among the artworks and the viewer in a single gallery that functions as a kind of "perception machine." By manipulating and restricting perception, the architects hope to intensify the viewer experience, rendering it more memorable and personal than that of a conventional gallery setting.

Organized by Terence Riley, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Christian Larsen, Curatorial Assistant, Research and Collections, Department of Architecture and Design.