'Lucy Raven: Ready Mix' at Neue Nationagalerie, Berlin, Germany

8 February 2024

From 9 February 2024, the Neue Nationalgalerie presents Lucy Raven’s 2021 video installation Ready Mix, which deals with the themes of work, technology, and the hidden mechanisms of power. From this sprawling installation in the upper hall of the museum, visitors will have a direct line of sight to the construction pit of the “berlin modern” building, and the work makes direct visual and thematic references to the monumental construction site of the new museum next door. The opening of the exhibition coincides with the laying of the foundation stone of the building, which is designed by Herzog & de Meuron.

Lucy Raven made her immersive film installation Ready Mix, 2021, on location at a concrete and gravel plant in Bellevue, Idaho. The work explores properties of force, pressure and materiality (both geological and synthetic) within the context of the Western United States. Born in Arizona, Raven frequently engages with the complex history of the region’s formation and depiction, as well as its contemporary role in global trade, communication and development.

The Neue Nationalgalerie invited Lucy Raven to exhibit Ready Mix on the occasion of the laying of the foundation stone of the berlin modern, which is under construction next door. Presented in the upper hall of the Mies van der Rohe building, the film allows us to appreciate the complicated legacies of Modernism, with its developed urban spaces, and celebration of built forms that incorporated raw materials like concrete. Further, it raises questions of durability, sustainability, and the autonomy of architecture as a modern form of visual culture and function.

'Ready Mix' is on view from 9 February – 21 April 2024.

Find further information via Neue Nationalgalerie.