Set against the night sky and the floodlit pyramids, the composition's nocturnal appearance was of particular significance, with a translucent stone skin and fractured triangulated geometries providing a contemporary counterpoint to the
solidity and geometric purity of the ancient structures.
Painted with photorealist attention to highlight and shadow, tactile stickiness and cool
solidity, these figures are endowed with the weight of specific materiality, yet they decline meaning.
From nearly 500 submissions, Tokyo-based Fumio Toki was selected to develop and build his proposal, a shimmering glass volume that seems paradoxically the antithesis of the
solidity and monumentality more traditionally associated with the repository of a nation's knowledge.
It always has something tense and disturbing about it, which somet imes undermines the painting, as happens in Propped Head, 1989--92., in which the arm supporting the head becomes a flat, alien intrusion into the picture, but more often lends the
solidity of Uglow's compositions an unexpected expressive plangency not so different after all from Freud's or Kossoff's, though more understated--more English, if you will.
Further undermining the work's upright, even architectonic
solidity are two series of photographs in the final room of the Braunschweig show: shots of New York facades distorted through extreme perspectives, so that the buildings seem to have lost their balance.
The linearity of the space and the verticality of the tembusu are softened by willows, which also counterbalance the
solidity of the stone.
From the famous leather couch, swaddled in oriental carpets, and the massed ranks of Greek and Egyptian antiquities, to the Arts and Crafts furniture and packed bookcases, the decor in Freud's former home speaks of bourgeois coziness and
solidity. Lucas's sculptures, by comparison, are gauche and wayward, bulls in a china shop.
Though much larger in scale, the long, low new additions echo the mass and
solidity of their predecessors, with copper clad roofs and hermetic walls of plain, sand-coloured concrete meticulously hammered and worked so that it will eventually acquire a patina akin to weathered stone.