Artist: Atelier Van Lieshout

Carpenters Workshop Gallery presents Bad Ideas for Good Living, a solo exhibition by Rotterdam-based Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL). Opening alongside publication of the same name, the show spans Ladbroke Hall’s gallery, Prouvé House, and gardens as a self-portrait of primal nature and the quest for a better world—the genesis of Atelier Van Lieshout’s foundation itself. The exhibition draws parallels between humans and nature, reflecting our shared instincts to survive, to dominate, and to strive for utopia.

Building on Atelier Van Lieshout recent project, The Voyage: A March to Utopia, where multiple large-scale sculptures stretched from entrance to exit of Art Basel’s 2025 Unlimited Hall, this new exhibition continues the exploration of human drives, invention, and alternative worlds. From mobile homes to biogas installations, the works are created to facilitate freedom, like birds roaming the planet, as well as autarky and survival – the oeuvre of the studio has been a mirror or our society for decades – a mirror that does not flatter, but confronts as exemplified by the controversial Domestikator, infamously installed at the piazza of the Centre Pompidou.

This provocation questions our relationship to nature, our need to domesticate or dominate, and threads ironically through functional sculptures, architecture, household objects, and the works Atelier Van Lieshout creates and exposes in the new publication Bad Ideas for Good Living and this show.

At the centre of the exhibition, Brutalist Monkey towers above all living creatures. Representing the beginning of mankind, the work merges evolution with Van Lieshout’s fascination for movements that shaped modernity. This same lust for invention—across art, design, and architecture—threads through Bad Ideas for Good Living, the new publication accompanying the exhibition. Like the countless functional sculptures that grew into entire movements, or his pioneering ecological projects such as the self-sufficient anarchist free state of AVL-Ville, Van Lieshout’s practice consistently merges invention with survival, proposing solutions, systems, and alternative paths. Whether through architecture, ecology, or sculpture, the works by the atelier embody an obsession with creating worlds where necessity and imagination co-exist.

Strong, Predatory and Wise—an eagle, a vulture, and an owl—heraldic creatures whose instincts mirror our own: to survive, dominate, hunt, reproduce, and explore. Alongside Brutalist Monkey, the works offer encounters that explore how humans, nature, and systems intersect with survival and invention.

Bad Ideas for Good Living, as the book explores, is a conceptual journey through Atelier Van Lieshout’s radical thought experiments, realised through the studio’s art and design that go beyond aesthetic objects, they are functional tools for an alternative way of life – and ultimately, a reminder that even in challenging times, the quest for a better world remains possible. The path to a good life might just begin with a bad idea.