Houses

Eight pointed house-like forms gather into one low horizontal sculpture. Repetition makes the silhouette read at once as a settlement, a procession, and a single remembered structure.

The dark cast paper gives the work unusual gravity, while flecks of 22-karat gold leaf interrupt the surface like points of light. The precious material does not erase the sculpture’s roughness; it heightens the tension between shelter and fragility.

The Pulitzer Arts Foundation describes Zarina’s early-1980s process of pouring or pressing wet paper fibres into deep-relief moulds and allowing them to dry into sculptural form. Through that process, paper becomes architecture: dense, tactile, and capable of occupying space.