Pablo Bronstein b. 1977

In 2009, Bronstein created a series of large ink and computer drawings imagining a mythical history and future of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He opened We Live in Mannerist Times at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2015, an exhibition of monumental line drawings and architectural renderings inspired by porcelain objects and Industrial Revolution-era manufacturing machines. 

For Bronstein’s Tate Britain Commission in 2016, Historical Dances in an Antique Setting, classically-trained dancers performed moves derived from the Italian concept of sprezzatura to 15th-century Spanish court music, set within an installation staged in the museum’s historic Duveen Gallery. At the RISD Museum, Providence, in 2019, Bronstein presented Historical Rhode Island Decor, comprising a new video work within an installation of original wallpapers and fabrics exploring how the architectural imagery of statehood shapes notions of the past. He conceived the installation Carousel for OGR Torino in 2019, taking the historic form of the zootrope, a pre-film animation device that produces optical illusions, as a point of departure to various mirrors and screens that shape contemporary experience. Hell in Its Heyday, consisting of a series of large-scale watercolors presenting ironic depictions of Hell, was presented at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, in 2021. The Temple of Solomon and Its Principal Contents, comprising imagined designs for the biblical structure, was presented at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, UK, in 2025.

At REDCAT, Los Angeles, in 2014, Bronstein presented a series of drawings, furniture, and performances that satirized the origins of architecture from the naturalistic perspective of the Enlightenment. He conceived Constantinople Kaleidoscope for Tate Modern in 2012, where a group of dancers created a baroque trompe l’oeil stage that exaggerated the architectural design of the museum. For Plaza Minuet (2006), conceived for the Tate Triennial in 2006, Bronstein subtly guided visitors to follow predetermined lines on the Duveen Gallery floor, followed by a quartet of dancers performing baroque and modernist ballet movements. In 2007, for the Performa Biennial, Bronstein created a “temporary architecture” from the bodies of seventeen ballet dancers who performed across four Financial District lobbies in New York, as if to structure allegorical cityscapes. He has been the subject of monographs including Postmodern Architecture in London (2006), A is Building, B is Architecture (2013), Pseudo-Georgian London (2017), Carousel (2019), Hell in Its Heyday (2021), Cuisine (2024), and The Temple of Solomon and Its Principal Contents (2025).