This is not the abstract melt-into-the-background corporate art that hotels and offices used once to prefer.
In the second the bust has grown abstract through melting.
"Inspired by the track's ambience and the textured sonorities, I aimed to produce abstract landscapes melting in a neon blue night, intertwined with a cold yet bright sunlight," the video artist discloses to Thrill Jockey.
The show features various interpretations of the smiley face, from abstract reinventions, melting sculptures, to religious statues gone smiley, lacquered wooden signs, pixelated and blissed out golden versions, and more.
It does, however, include many stunning pieces, like the Chilean painter Roberto Matta's melting abstract landscapes (painted in Paris in 1938 and reflecting the anxiety of impending war), and the work of a contemporary Brazilian artist, Adriana Varejão, who uses pottery fragments to symbolize the breakdown of colonialism.
This may account for the large amount of design-intensive new work: Megan Francis Sullivan's shelving, Tobias Kaspar's on-the-floor sweater, Chuck Nanney's melt-down abstract painting and the very '20s-looking figurative painting by Birgit Megerle.
Plastic cord goes into a melting device, and small, abstract sculptures woven of spidery threads come out below.
Arturo Herrera's concern with flattened silhouettes is evident in both a lively collage and one of his felt cut-out pieces, which reduce Disney characters to a suggestive, melting form that is abstract yet naggingly familiar.
How can we expect anyone to care about melting glaciers in the abstract, in news articles and scientific papers, when even in the face of their stupendous presence we remain careless?
In a his-and-hers medley of "The Very Thought of You" and "Tea for Two," the abstract dreaminess of the first song melted into the second song's picture of intimate togetherness.
In the background is the dancer La Goulue, while the room itself melts into a curtain of abstract colour.
