Replacement interior: Matthew Darbyshir. An exhibition for modern living

McDonald's has never seemed more appealing to me than in 2007, when, exhausted from wandering around north London, I remembered that the US chain had just launched its experimental redesign. I hadn't eaten in 16 hours and a cherry red, still stain-free Arne Jacobsen Egg Chair by Fritz Hansen (or not, so to speak) was sitting unoccupied in the window. I made myself comfortable, inhaled an oversized french fry in front of half of the neighborhood's commuters, and thought to myself: You idiot.

That's not exactly the message Matthew Darbyshire is sending this week with his new retrospective, An Exhibition for Modern Living, at the Manchester Art Gallery, but it is the image of fast food that is winning over consumers with “curated” interiors in fashionable London , reflected a curious intersection of taste, class and accessibility that was not lost on the artist.

The exhibition's name comes from a modern design exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Art in 1949, a wildly optimistic time when the city had America's highest average income. The city, of course, is now broke – ruined by a combination of globalization, inefficiency and its own hubris. And Darbyshire's room sets, with modern furniture and replacement graffiti – Jacobsen chairs in the middle – might as well be in the Next catalogue. How times have changed.

Next, we're treated to a collection of hand-carved wooden artifacts—drinking utensils, abacus tribal figurines—on loan from the museum's archives. Only they are exhibited in a room completely furnished with synthetic oak, transported along with the floor from the exhibition room of a residential building in the Olympic Village. Their new ambience gives them a look that is less museum-like than “Cigar Shop Indian.”

I like that Darbyshire opened his show in the middle of the London Design Festival, like the Greek choir looking down from the north, with a cryptic dialogue about how we worship, consume, reproduce and attribute quality to things. His most impressive new work is a 3D-printed polycarbonate figure of Doryphorus of Polykleitos, a copy of a marble that has been copied repeatedly since the pre-modern period. From a distance it appears blurry and holographic, but up close it almost disappears due to the floating layers of plastic – like a trompe l'oeil sculpture that only comes together when you look at it from a certain point.

It's not meant to shame the other work, but in some ways The Disappearing Man appears to be the most significant of all.

The exhibition's name comes from a modern design exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Art in 1949, a wildly optimistic time when the city had America's highest average income. The city is now broke, of course – ruined by a combination of globalization, inefficiency and its own hubris; It's an unfortunate parallel to Darbyshire's own work. In the picture: OfficeHerald Street, 2014.

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