The art of not taking out the bins: Madelon Vriesendorp, at the Cosmic House, reviewed

‘I was really angry at this fly,’ the artist Madelon Vriesendorp explains with a grin as I hold out my hand to shake hers, which is in a splint. ‘I jumped onto the bed to swat it, fell over and broke my wrist.’ Vriesendorp is showing me around her latest exhibition, which follows a long list of achievements: she co-founded the ground-breaking architectural practice OMA, and her illustrations of architectural theory defined its visual language for a generation. Now in her late seventies, she’s still characteristically unserious, except about one thing: ‘I’m very serious about jokes.’

The exhibition, Cosmic Housework, is Vriesendorp’s reinterpretation of Cosmic House, the home-turned-museum of Charles Jencks, the late architectural theorist-designer. It’s a space she knows well, having been his long-time friend and collaborator. Not your usual white-cube exhibition space, Cosmic House is a colourful explosion of postmodern puns.