Now on view through May 4th is Austrian artist Helmut Lang’s exhibition, What remains behind. Presented by MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and with support from Saint Laurent, Lang’s first Los Angeles based solo exhibition sees the artist make use of the historic Schindler House, designed by the influential Rudolph Schindler. Amidst the concrete walls of each room, Lang has filled the space with formless primordial structures.

What remains behind considers the limbo state, the inbetween, and the beauty that is born within these concepts: what is real and what's imagined, what we long for before we have it, remnants of the past that push us into the future. The sculptures themselves once soft and malleable made hard and heady through time and artistic intent.

The curves and mounds of these structures feel akin to distorted memories–where the outline of the figure is clear, but the details fuzzy. Their bodylike structure is both representative of repressed sexual desire of the psyche, and fragmentations of personal identity. They are human-like, and yet alien and abstract–highlighting Lang’s themes of self-perception and the body.

In order to create such haunting sculptures, Lang used handed-down mattress foam, rubber, and wax. Though soft in their genesis, these materials eventually hardened into the otherworldly creations that echo throughout the house. Lang’s decision to create with scrapped materials stems from his desire to rewrite the stories of the materials through the act of sculpting. The result of this process is the creation of structures towing the line between abstraction and realism. With their skin-like texture and formless shape, Lang creates the echoes of humanity that haunt the Schindler House.

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