Build by Patricia Cain

BROTH art is delighted to launch an exhibition at L’Entrepot showcasing multi-award winning work by artist Patricia Cain.

Cain spent 4 years on site at the Zaha Hadid-designed Riverside Museum in Glasgow while it was under construction. Working in pastel from sketches made during these visits, she deftly captured the skeletal structure of this celebrated example of modern architecture. The resultant series of work attracted awards including the Threadneedle Prize (2010) and the Aspect Prize (2010) and paved the way for further accolades, such as the RWS award (2014) and the Arte Laguna Prize in Venice (2014).


The recently late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid is well known for her groundbreaking designs, which seem to defy gravity and upturn basic principals of engineering with their gigantic swoops and curves. Her design for Riverside Museum, which the Guardian described as one of her ‘most direct’ is no exception. Featuring a roofline designed ‘as if squeezed from a gothic tube of toothpaste’, the building has a seamless fluidity, which betrays nothing of its construction. Cain’s work exposes the complex process of creating the apparently effortless folds of the museum’s striking , zinc panel-clad roof.
Zaha Hadid said of the project:
“Patricia Cain’s work on the Riverside Transport Museum brilliantly captures a singular moment of the build: uniquely documenting the geometric complexity and structural integrity of the museum’s design.”

Cain’s work on show at L’Entrepot highlights the dynamic relationships between art, architecture and industry. While representational, her meticulously rendered pastels of this towering construction site emphasise its inherent abstract forms. Cain is driven by the belief that the artists’ role is one of the observer and to capture moments in process, she explains.
“Invariably, my work is on the cusp of both abstraction and figuration - a place where observation turns inwards…The dominant energy resides in empty space: it is the absence or negative space that activates the artwork, yet also makes it unstable.”

Today’s cities across Britain are seeing unprecedented regeneration and rapid development. The landscape of East London in particular, is a life-form that continues to grow and redefine itself. Build is a series of work that records the process of change and brings our attention to the impressive feats of engineering that are so quickly eclipsed by the architectural outcome.