Sonia Leimer
The Cosmic House, Jencks Foundation, London, UK
2 October 2024 – 30 August 2025
The artist Sonia Leimer draws on her background in architecture to explore all sorts of different spaces, from the dense, urban environment and its many non-spaces, to the vast expanse of outer space. These interests are placed in an ideal context in her exhibition at the Cosmic House in Holland Park, London. Built in the 1970s, the Cosmic House is a landmark of post-Modernist architecture, mixing caricatural, exaggerated traditional elements of its elegant neighbourhood with the contemporary architectural theory of its time. The exhibitions presented there explore this layering of architecture, ecology, the cosmos, and the relationship between architecture and the outside world.
For her exhibition, Leimer created a new site-specific work based on research conducted during several residencies at the Cosmic House in 2023. While there, the artist has been collecting dust from the roof of the house. Working with the support of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Leimer analysed the collected material, and uncovered a fascinating array of particles in her search for ‘cosmic dust’. These tiny particles, often dark in colour and slightly magnetic due to their original chemical composition, can be easily mistaken for ordinary Earth dust. Through microscope photography, Leimer captured these minute particles, using them as inspiration for her sculptures made of bronze, aluminium and glass. Leimer’s sculptures bring into view something that is typically invisible but intrinsically linked to the city.
In addition to the photographs, Leimer also produced a film in which she captured micro recordings of the Cosmic House, accentuating details such as textures, surfaces and closeups of the architecture. These recordings were combined with footage from the Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Scotland and a microscopic journey through the collected dust from The Cosmic House at the Natural History Museum in Vienna.
Sonia Leimer (born 1977 in Meran, Italy, lives and works in Vienna) works with film, sculpture and installation to interrogate categories of space and time. Her works have been exhibited at Manifesta 7, Rovereto, Italy; the 6th Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Russia, the 17th Venice Architecture Biennial, Italy, as well as at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Salzburger Kunstverein and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles.
This is her first collaboration with Phileas.
