Delirious Seagram

First shown: 
5–19 June 2026
 Stallan-Brand Gallery
, Glasgow UK Curated by Aaron Roth The Seagram Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1958, contains a restaurant formerly known as The Four Seasons. Outside architectural circles, however, the building is perhaps best known not for what it contains but for what it lacks: a series of murals commissioned from the abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko. Rothko ultimately rejected the commission, reportedly repulsed by the prospect of his paintings serving as a backdrop to the three-martini lunches of New York’s wealthy elite. Following his death by suicide, this refusal became heavily mythologised, often framed as a final act of artistic defiance. The murals themselves were eventually donated to Tate Britain, arriving the day after his death. Delirious Seagram reflects on and symbolically dissects a night the artist spent in the second-floor bar of the building and the aftermath of a martini-filled blackout, a delirious return home ending with a twisted ankle. The irony not being lost is that the Seagram Corporation was once the largest liquor company in the world, known for their gin. The artist within this context probes questions concerning what happens when we begin connecting with architecture poetically, symbolically and start to perceive a building’s components through an amplified lens of emotion and delirium. That night could be framed as a pilgrimage, one akin to those going to the Tate to visit the Rothko Room and hope to cry (as we are expected to). Similarly, many architects visit the Seagram Building to have a drink at the bar they probably cannot really afford while listening to investment bankers babble about deal flow and look out at the Philip Johnson-designed restaurant and maybe hope to cry too, adding another stamp to their pilgrim passport on their route through the relics of modernism. Desova engages with this question by confronting us with a suspended 1:2 replica of the tower’s façade, too tall for the space of the gallery in which it is mangled and crushed to fit within. The façade, replicated in foam and fabric, has its mullions exaggerated like those on the actual building as bronze-clad I-beams. The grey nylon fabric is constructed as closely as possible to the blueprints of the original drawings of the façade module. The colour also references the wall of the Laurentian Library as Rothko did in his paintings meant for Seagram, the grey nylon window systems becoming reminiscent in colour and function, with a view to nowhere. In this case though, the material implies a cutting humour that runs silently through the work of Desova. The sculptural composition echoes Madelon Vriesendorp’s Flagrant Crime (1978), which depicts the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings lying in bed with the 30 Rockefeller Plaza building walking in on them, with the implication of classic scenes of infidelity. The buildings, like the work of Desova, are depicted so as to appear made of fabric, limp after the act. The façade is like a mirror image of New York’s own grid, which Rem Koolhaas frames in his retrospective manifesto Delirious New York in the context of a dream and fantasy equivalent to that of the other great modernist projects. Rather than a tool to divide up and speculate on land (Manhattan was bought, in heavy air quotes, for 20 dollars and a clock), but as “one of the greatest leaps of faith in the history of humanity”. On the floor, a piece made out of waterjet-cut Roman travertine, Travertini (2026), shaped as a martini glass sits connected together by aluminium tubes echoing the material palette in the lobby of the building. In a memetic way, Desova uses it similarly to ground the other works, but also she takes this material with its classical references and turns them around, making what is ephemeral, a martini in a glass, permanent in stone. The seeming foreverness and the canon of modernism could all fade away into liquid. The façade has become soft and melting while the martini has become solid, compressed over millions of years in an instant. It becomes the fantasy of every drunk, a glass that’s forever full no matter how much one drinks. The humour is twofold, drawing out that the construction of such a modernist masterpiece was also an advertisement for Seagram and, by this transformation of material, draws this out. The work Untitled (2026) (Mannequins Can Sprain Their Ankle Too), a photograph of a mannequin’s leg that is held together by cling film and rested by a brick, was taken at the Women’s Market in Sofia, Bulgaria. The work acts as a metaphor of the artist’s sprained ankle in the most literal sense, printed onto silver photographic paper. Isolated in the centre, it imitates the format of an Orthodox icon, not hand-painted but an iPhone photo taken seemingly carelessly. I see the image as a self-ironic gesture: the desire to make oneself the victim, to be made Saint Veronika. The image is framed like a preview window on a laptop, or an image too low-resolution to fill the page. The implication is that as the fundamental visual tool of the Enlightenment, one-point perspective seems to fade away on the desktop, leading to an almost Byzantine construction of perspective. The show can be seen in the wider context of Desova’s work as part of a longstanding engagement with the contending aftermath of Modernism, bobbing through its wake of utopian ideas and architectural fragments placed in contrast to that alchemy, the irrational, the phantasmic and the ephemeral, between corporate office and fog bank. In this case, the bronze-clad steel façade of Mies van der Rohe, once a vision of the future, melts into a mass of fabric and foam as a vision of a future that never came. A martini becomes calcified prematurely in travertine while a mannequin’s reinforced leg becomes an analogue for a sprained ankle. The artist asks us to view architecture through the prism of delirium. These works imply a drunk architecture. Soft façades to fall into, stone glasses to drink from and photos half remembered but injuries still with us. In the morning, with a splitting headache, the anxiety creeps up about what happens when what’s left of Modernism finally all melts away. Text by Aaron Roth LIST OF WORKS 1. Untitled (Mannequins Can Sprain Their Ankle Too), 2026
 Digital print on silver photographic paper
 48 × 33 cm 2. 1:2 Study of Seagram Facade Modular System, 2026
 Fabric and foam sculpture
 3.5 × 2.2 m (variable dimensions) 3. Travertini, 2026 
Travertine, metal and aluminium fixing components 
55 × 40 cm