Featured in The Shrunken World of Denis Savary
At Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zurich, the artist’s series of dollhouses reference literature and art history to reveal a bygone bourgeois ideal
Denis Savary’s exhibition, ‘Ithaca’, at Galerie Maria Bernheim comprises three large dollhouses modelled after the red-shingled roof and stucco exterior of Swiss suburban family homes. By distorting these generic forms, the Geneva-based artist unsettles associations with a bygone bourgeois ideal, projecting a literary and art-historical phantasmagoria onto its components. It is as if an altered centre of gravity has warped these oversized miniatures, leaving roofs concave and doors slanted. The effect is uncanny, precisely in the way Sigmund Freud’s defined the term in his eponymous 1919 essay about the familiar-yet-eerie nature of dolls.