Organized around a strange and compelling curatorial hypothesis—that depictions of architectural interiors in themselves constitute a pseudo-genre of contemporary artistic representation—Inside Architecture reads as an idea in process that nonetheless seems resolute in its embrace of a single conceptual thread. Photographs form the exhibition’s armature; a few paintings and drawings are dispersed among these. Within the dominant category of photography, Candida Höfer’s airless, grave interiors stand beside the kitschy Architectural Digest snippets of Richard Prince, collectively arguing for the emotive range of uninhabited rooms.

Höfer’s work and Prince’s, along with the equally haunted sensibility of Paul Winstanley’s photographs, make the most sense here. All take as their subjects space alone, and bracket every social or psychological implication such space might contain within the apparatus of an interior design. So when people—inhabited space—shows up elsewhere in the show, it begins to lose focus. Its one provocative hypothesis is stretched thin. Watching people move through architecture seems to me an entirely different psychological and visual prospect, much more a proper anthropological study. There is something far more compelling about attempting to let architecture speak for itself, through a medium which it is not.

- Nico Machida

(*Image: Thomas Struth, Inside Architecture: Selections from the Permanent Collection, March 9 - June 1, 2008; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Pergamon Museum II, Berlin; 2001, C-print mounted on Plexiglas, 70 3/4 x 88 5/8 in, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, purchased with funds provided by the Curatorial Discretionary Fund; © 2008 Thomas Struth.  Candida Höfer,, Inside Architecture: Selections from the Permanent Collection, March 9 - June 1, 2008; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Dresden I, 1999, C-print, edition 1/6, 23 1/2 x 23 1/2 in., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, purchased with funds provided by the Curatorial Discretionary Fund; © Candida Höfer,/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 1999.  Paul Sietsema, Inside Architecture: Selections from the Permanent Collection, March 9 - June 1, 2008; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Untitled (Black History), 2003, cut photographs and tape, 20 5/8 x 30 1/4 in, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Photo by Brian Forrest.)