Artists

Lake Verea

Press release

Opening: Saturday, 30 May 2026, 3-6pm Introduction by the artists at 4pm. Zander Galerie is delighted to present Full Moon Party, the first exhibition of work by the Mexican artist duo Lake Verea at the gallery. The presentation gathers key bodies of work from their ongoing series DarkRooms (initiated in 2011), inviting viewers into the exhibition space as guests to a nocturnal party. Working with different cameras and formats, both analogue and digital, Lake Verea explore iconic works of modern architecture under conditions of darkness and reflected full moon light. Through long exposures and a practice of "slow photography," the duo indulges in experimenting with "Deep Time" in search of "intimacy and sexiness". Their images reveal atmospheres and spatial experiences that remain invisible during daylight. The works shift attention from architectural shapes to the subtle interplay of light, shadow, and time. The exhibition includes night views of iconic twentieth century buildings by Luis Barragán, Philip Johnson, and Albert Frey — three architects whose personal lives and domestic spaces have become inseparable from their architectural legacies. Casa Barragán (1948) in Mexico City — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004 — was Barragán's private home and studio for over forty years until his death in 1988. The house remains today a site of pilgrimage for architects, artists, and designers the world over, preserved exactly as Barragán left it. Philip Johnson's Brick House (1949) is a guest house located just 25 meters from the iconic Glass House, where Johnson and his partner lived and hosted the leading figures of art, architecture, and culture for decades. A provocative and inviting shelter, the Brick House was a site of performances, dance, and parties of every kind — an epicenter of the US avant-garde. In contrast to the domestic warmth and vibrancy of the other houses, the Aluminaire House (1931) by Albert Frey and Lawrence Kocher presented a revolutionary design as a 1:1 scale model of a proposal for bulk housing in the US. Originally built in ten days, the Aluminaire House changed location and owner several times and is now part of the Palm Springs Art Museum. Only the exterior is photographed, allowing the moonlight to produce graffiti-like reflections on the aluminum surface and illuminated screws that resemble/echo the starry skies. The exhibition reflects on perception, inwardness, solitude, silence and the transformative potential of light, or the absence of it, inviting viewers to encounter architecture beyond its familiar image. This process, almost meditative, recontextualizes iconic twentieth-century architecture as poetic explorations of the passage of time. The photographic work is paired with frottages, or "frottography" as Lake Verea call it, a hybrid technique that involves directly pressing photographic paper against a surface — in this case the concrete, wood, and steel of the buildings — and exposing it to light. Together, the photographs and frottographies create an expanded sensory encounter with architecture and its materials. Lake Verea is a queer artist duo formed in 2005 by Francisca Rivero-Lake Cortina (b. 1973) and Carla Verea Hernández (b. 1978), both born in Mexico City. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Fundación Casa de México, Madrid; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs; Bendana Pinel Art Contemporain, Paris; and Yale Architecture Gallery, New Haven. Their work has also been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and at the Mexican Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Works by Lake Verea are held in prominent public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the JPMorganChase Corporate Art Collection, New York; Fundación Casa Wabi, Mexico City; and the Barragan Foundation, Basel.