Lorna Bauer Turns E-1027 Into a Study of Memory and Reflection
At Trotter & Sholer in New York, Lorna Bauer’s “Maison en Bord de Mer” returns to one of modernism’s most contested houses: E-1027, the seaside villa Eileen Gray designed with Jean Badovici in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera. Rather than treating the building as a fixed icon, Bauer uses it as a source of images, forms, and distortions, building an exhibition that moves between architecture, photography, and glass.
Bauer first visited E-1027 in 2017, while in Athens for another project, and spent the afternoon photographing the house. The visit stayed with her. In 2021, she made 24 works based on a mirror she saw there, and the new exhibition expands that line of inquiry through kiln-formed glass sculptures, photographs, and mirrored surfaces. Works including “Lemon Tree,” “Music Corner,” “Palms,” “A House Is Not A Machine 1,” and “Fenêtre Paravent” translate details from the villa into objects that feel both precise and unstable.
The historical weight of E-1027 remains central to the show. Le Corbusier painted murals inside the house about a decade after it was built, Gray later described them as vandalism in 1952, and he tried and failed to buy the property from Badovici. He instead built cabins next door in 1952 and later died swimming there in 1965. Badovici died in 1956, and the house entered a long period of neglect before renovations under the care of the French government.
That layered history has helped keep Gray’s name in circulation, especially as E-1027 has been repeatedly rediscovered and reassessed. Bauer, whose practice often begins with art-historical anecdotes and structured research, has said she likes “delving into making work” with “some sort of structure around it.” Here, that structure is a house whose meaning has been shaped as much by dispute as by design.
The exhibition also sharpens Bauer’s interest in photography’s relationship to memory. Several works incorporate images from her E-1027 visit, while others use hand-mirroring and distorted reflections to suggest how unstable looking can be. The result is a show that treats the villa not as a monument, but as a site where history keeps shifting depending on where you stand.
“Maison en Bord de Mer” is on view at Trotter & Sholer, 168 Suffolk St, New York, through August 8.
