Pezo von Ellrichshausen and Felice Varini will design public pavilion in Hull, City of Culture 2017

Felice Varini was born in 1952 in Locarno, Switzerland and is now based in Paris. His extensive work explores the illusions of geometry through eye-deceiving photographic techniques together with the tradition of pictorial representation. His spatial installations make use of urban settings, walls, and rooms as screens for abstract graphical projections which he paints, draws or adhere with tape. Seen from an ideal vantage point, they appear as unexpected two-dimensional patterns against their three- dimensional architectural background. When the viewer then leaves this vantage point and moves through the space, he sees the work as a perpetual metamorphosis of shifting, evolving complex forms.

His work is part of numerous private and public collections and it is documented in monographic editions such as Place by Place or Point of View by Lars Muller. It has been nominated to the Marcel Duchamp Prize and widely exhibited, amongst other venues, at the rooftop of LeCorbusier’s iconic Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Niigata Water and Land Art Festival in Japan.

Pezo von Ellrichshausen is an art and architecture studio founded in 2002 by Mauricio Pezo (b. Renaico, Chile, 1973) ) and Sofia von Ellrichshausen (b. Bariloche, Argentina, 1976). They live and work in southern Chile, on a farm at the foot of the Andes Mountains.

They are Professor of the Practice at AAP Cornell University in New York and have been Visiting Professors at the GSD Harvard University, the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, the University of Texas in Austin, the Porto Academy and the Universidad Catolica de Chile.

Their work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the MAXXI in Rome and as part of the Permanent Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  They have been invited to the Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition (2010, 2016), where they also were the curators for the Chilean Pavilion in 2008.

Among other venues, they have lectured at MIT, Princeton University, Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Architecture League of New York, the Tate Modern, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Alvar Aalto Symposium and the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Their work has been distinguished with the Mies Crown Hall Americas Emerge Prize by the IIT, the Rice Design Alliance Prize, the Iberoamerican Architecture Biennial Award and the Chilean Architecture Biennial Award.

The work of the studio has been widely published and edited in monographic issues of El Croquis, AV in Madrid, A+U in Tokyo, 2G in Barcelona and in the essay books Spatial Structure (B Architecture publisher) and Naïve Intention (Actar).

Mauricio Pezo (b. 1973) completed a Master in Architecture at the Universidad Catolica and a degree in Architecture at the Universidad del Bio-Bio. He has been awarded the Young Architect Prize by the Chilean Architects Association and the Municipal Art Prize by the Concepcion City Hall.

Sofia von Ellrichshausen (b. 1976) holds a degree in Architecture from the Universidad de Buenos Aires where she was distinguished with the FADU- UBA Honours Diploma. She was the president of the jury at the Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition (2018).