Assaf EvronCollage for the Arts Club of Chicago

Collage for the Arts Club is the fourth chapter in the Collages for Mies van der Rohe project in which the artist has been installing monumental photographs on the famed architect’s buildings. Following the McCormick House, The Esplanade Apartment, and S.R. Crown Hall, this is the first interior installation in the series. Evron’s photographic installation will intervene on the glass-boxed historic staircase of the Arts Club of Chicago. The steel and travertine marble staircase was designed by Mies in 1949-1951 for the Arts Club’s Rush St. location and was repositioned in 1998 by Architect John Vinci to its current location at 210 E. Ontario St. The image of the semi-transparent conch shell installed on the glass windows corresponds to the form of the enclosed staircase and echoes the ancient past and geological history of its stone cladding. This project is based on speculative paper collages made by Mies van der Rohe in his American period, from the late 1930s and on. In these collages, Mies was experimenting and negotiating the relationships between landscape, artworks, and materials interacting on his minimalist architectural stage.

Assaf Evron is an artist and a photographer based in Chicago. His work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it reflects in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking in various two and three-dimensional media. Looking at moments along the histories of modernism Evron questions the construction of individual and collective identities, immigration (of people, ideas, images) and the representations of democracy.

His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally as The Museum for Contemporary Art in Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum for American Art and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others. Evron holds an MA from The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University as well as an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he currently teaches.