Frank Gehry
28 February, 1929 - 5 December, 2025
At the beginning of 2020, Gehry, then 91, designed an installation of six figurines for “The Triadic Ballet” by Oskar Schlemmer in the LA Phil Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, a building of his own design, opend in 2003. Curated by Stephanie Barron and realized by C. Raman Schlemmer, it stands as the most spectacular presentation of this avant-garde work from 1922. The lighting, developed by C. Raman Schlemmer from a concept by Arnold Chan of Isometrix, London, transformed the figures, allowing their forms and colours to engage with Gehry’s sweeping curves and soaring spaces. Presented as part of the festival “Weimar Variations”, conceived by composer and LA Phil Conductor Laureate Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gehry and C. Raman Schlemmer attended all the concerts in the series, while thousands of visitors encountered Schlemmer’s figurines in the grandeur of the concert hall spaces rather than a traditional museum context. In this extraordinary setting, the timeless work’s sculptural and architectural essence emerged with striking clarity, each figure poised between stillness and movement, light and shadow, inviting a quiet, almost contemplative immersion in space, form, and colour.
C. Raman Schlemmer remembers: 'My first encounters with Gehry’s work date back to 1977, during my stay in Los Angeles. At that time, Robert Rauschenberg was working on a new series of prints at the Gemini Editions workshops. He worked at night, and Ayn and Stanley Grinstein, together with Gemini’s stylish partner Sidney Felsen — always wearing a Panama hat — asked whether I might spend some time with Rauschenberg while he was working. So I would interrupt my nightly club tour, stopping by to watch him create. The Gemini building on Melrose Avenue — one of Gehry’s earliest architectural statements — already embodied his experimental approach, with its characteristic use of plywood and raw industrial materials, emblematic of Southern California’s radical architectural language of the period. Experiencing this construction offered an early insight into Gehry’s spatial thinking, long before his later monumental projects. Gehry reengaged these dynamic structures in his intricate installation of dynamically interlocked plywood pedestals for “The Triadic Ballet” for the LA Phil in 2020, where they unfolded as an architectural choreography of form and space.
In 2019, I was invited to join to celebrate Frank Gehry’s 90th birthday with a concert followed by a dinner in the “Pierre Boulez Saal”, a “salle module”, hall he had designed himself, opened in 2017 as a gift to his friend Daniel Barenboim as part of the Barenboim–Said Akademie, Deutsche Staatsoper, Berlin.
Among Gehry’s most transformative works is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. It was Carmen Giménez who first proposed the idea of establishing a Guggenheim Museum in what was then a severely depressed region of the Basque Country in northern Spain.
The opening dinner in 1997, attended by 900 seated guests in the vast hall where Richard Serra’s monumental works since are installed, took place on my birthday, 18 October, in the presence of Their Majesties the King and Queen of Spain, Juan Carlos and Sofía, together with contemporary artists, Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, the actress Alba Clemente et al.
In 2022 I returned for the 25 years gala dinner celebration of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and enjoyed breakfast with Gehry the next morning, before he (93) continued to Berlin and Abu Dhabi.'
Photo: © C. Raman Schlemmer
