24 Houses

“24 Houses” contains a selection of ink drawings from Jonas von Ostrowski’s series, “Houses” (2015-2020): detailed layouts of imaginary houses, each provided with its respective title.

The “houses” act less like plans for actual houses to be built, and more like expressions of emotional states, spatial equivalents of various sensitivies or as stages for humankind’s predicaments. Ostrowski uses the blueprint as a legible form, similar to a text, through which he explores the narrative potential of the relationships unfolding between walls, doors and windows. Thus, 24 Houses is a collection of spatial short stories, a novel of 24 chapters in blueprint-format.

One of the drawings serves as the layout for the first habitable sculpture in “Los Angeles”. The artist has been working on this continously growing and self-evolving art space on the edge of a small village in rural Nordhessen for several years, which opened in 2020 with “House with clear shapes and a complex entrance”.