Frank Gehry’s interest in fish began in childhood. According to the artist, his grandmother would bring home a carp weekly, letting it swim in the family bathtub before using it to make gefilte fish. But Gehry’s fascination with–and use of–fish transcends family history. The artist, designer and architect, who has called the animal “the perfect form,” and has said it offers him “a complete vocabulary,” has used the fish and his famous fish lamps as a recurring motif to embody his innovative design ethos, the evolution of which can be seen in his fish lamps, from their first incarnation in 1983, to Untitled (London I), 2013.

“The fish is more than a metaphorical expression of Gehry’s architecture. Its shape is primal. The fish is ancient, and its very connection to prehistoric times gives it another level of meaning for Gehry. In the mid-1970s, as architects began to move away from modernism and seek ways in which to incorporate historical form into contemporary architecture, Gehry was both intrigued and appalled. He shared the feeling that modern architecture had worked itself into something of a dead end, and he understood, at least intellectually, the appeal of looking with renewed sympathy at the historical architecture that a previous generation had all but dismissed as irrelevant. But in his heart Gehry remained a modernist. For all that he understood the limits of modernism at the time, it was never in his nature to look backward. He had never been comfortable with mimicking the forms of the past, and he was far more interested in finding other ways out of the dilemma of modernism’s aesthetic fatigue. The fish, for Gehry, was one of those ways—its form was emphatically not modern; perhaps even more to the point, it was not really a part of the architectural vocabulary at all” (“Frank Gehry: Fish Lamps,” The Gagosian Quarterly, 2021).

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