We thought modernism had been relegated to museums, frozen in the concrete facades of our suburbs or the dusty pages of architectural manifestos. But Lucy Williams is reviving it in her own way: in miniature, with delicacy and poetry. At the Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, the British artist presents "Radiant City" from November 6, 2025. In her third solo exhibition at this venue, she transposes Le Corbusier's grandiose dreams into a universe that is both obsessive and intimate, where each fragment becomes a subject for contemplation.
Williams works like a goldsmith. Her works begin with a precise drawing, which becomes a digital template. Using this as a basis, she laser-cuts the structural base, then cuts colored paper to form the various elements, before applying ascending layers of various materials such as paper, Plexiglas, wood veneer, fabric, or metal. Curtains, bookshelves, lamps, vases, lampshades, and tiles gradually appear, frozen in a bas-relief where the eye hesitates: is it painting or sculpture? Everything is flat, yet everything seems to have a certain depth. Her compositions belong to this ambiguous territory, suspended between image and object, where the viewer oscillates between fascination and doubt.
Modernism, as we know, sought to be rational, functional, and austere. Williams, however, infuses it with unexpected warmth. Her embroidered threads meander like poetic scars. Her colors—eggplant, slate, powder pink—soften the rigidity of concrete. She introduces ornamentation where Le Corbusier had banished it.
Her works evoke Anni Albers in terms of textiles, Ruth Asawa in terms of the lightness of the threads, and the geometries of Jean Arp and Alexander Calder. Like them, Williams works with tension, structure, and vibration. Joseph Becker, assistant curator at SFMOMA, also highlights the "energy, dedication, and intentionality" she brings to her work. But in her case, all this is coupled with an artisanal intimacy, a patient gesture that humanizes modernist coldness.
By choosing the title "Radiant City," Williams not only references Le Corbusier's unrealized architectural project, she also explores its contradictions: an egalitarian ambition that veers toward uniformity, a collective utopia that ultimately crushes the individual. The designer's works are beautiful and seductive, but empty. No characters appear in them. And yet, when faced with these deserted interiors, we feel the urge to enter them, to live in them. It is this paradox that gives her work its narrative power: the coldness of the architectural lines transforms into an appeal to the viewer.
During the pandemic, Williams ventured into abstraction to explore the rhythmic and repetitive visual qualities of form: colorful triangles floating above vertical threads, lyrical patterns, control of space reminiscent of modernists Naum Gabo or Barbara Hepworth. These non-figurative compositions are now reintroduced into her architectural scenes. Ornamentation, which was banned by modernism, reappears in suspended touches, as if geometric rigor had to be cracked by poetry.
Radiant City is also about memory. Collective memory: that of an era when architecture sought to transform society. Personal memory: the interiors depicted by the artist—swimming pools, living rooms, libraries—resonate with our own memories. By reducing these spaces to the size of a painting, Williams transforms them into objects of contemplation. We look at them like voyeurs, fascinated by the detail, but kept at a distance. It is this tension between attraction and frustration that gives the experience its intensity.
Lucy Williams does not naively celebrate modernism: she recomposes it, revealing its contradictions while also extracting unexpected beauty. Her "radiant cities" are utopias in pieces, turned into poetic fragments. In a world saturated with megacities, she reminds us that it is sometimes on a smaller scale, in miniature, that the desire to inhabit is reborn.
Eve Kaplan
Lucy Williams – Radiant City Berggruen Gallery
10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco (United States)
November 6, 2025, to January 8, 2026
