Frida Escobedo
PROJECT
Frida Escobedo reinterprets the bi-fold room divider as a device for questioning the idea of privacy. The panels of Screen 01 comprise windows, blinds and reflective film – viewers may feel as though they are looking through someone’s window or through the room divider itself. The feeling of voyeurism is deliberate: Escobedo recalls her childhood fascination with peering through windows to glimpse other realities. The folding screen has long been associated with the female body, particularly the domestic interior and boudoir. By creating a screen that reveals rather than conceals, Escobedo destabilises the boundary between private and public.
The acquisition of this artist’s work is supported by Helen & Michael Gannon, and Sophie Gannon & Frazer East
ABOUT
Defying convention, Frida Escobedo has forged her own path since graduating from architecture school. She founded her eponymous studio in Mexico City in 2006, and her early commissions included housing, cultural spaces and hotels, alongside installations for exhibitions at spaces such as Lisbon Architecture Triennial (Portugal), the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (UK), and Chicago Architecture Biennial (US), which established her practice as open and experimental. This was consolidated in 2018, when she became the youngest architect to create London’s Serpentine Pavilion. In 2022 she was appointed to renovate the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, scheduled to open in 2030. Escobedo has also begun collaborating with French studio Moreau Kusunoki on the renovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, also planned for completion in 2030.