The Stedelijk Museum presents Something They Have To Live With, a new installation by Brussels-based Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie. A synthesis of painting, craft, fashion and architecture, McKenzie uses old-fashioned techniques like the trompe l’œil effect, defies genres, and borrows, or “magpies” as she calls it in an interview with Barbara Engelbach, what she needs when she needs it. In the historic building’s IMC gallery (formerly the “Hall of Honor”) McKenzie shows large, colorful paintings in which she reproduces geometric patterns from the Alhambra palace in Granada. Also eye-catching is a large “model” made out of cube-shaped canvasses painted in an abstract play of marble-like lines, which is based on the interior of Adolf Loos’ Villa Müller in Prague. Smaller works include a series of small, detailed architectural models and two metal mannequins sporting beautiful, fragile necklaces by Atelier E.B., the label McKenzie launched in 2008 with Edinburgh-based textile designer Beca Lipscombe. Palpable in her work are issues related to power, politics and gender but they are never overtly present. Dan Fox described McKenzie’s style in a Frieze review as “dexterous draftsmanship and punchy graphic sense, an updated Jugendstil figuration spliced with a neo-New Romantic nostalgia”. True enough but there is, with McKenzie’s work, always more to it than words can describe. You have to see it for yourself.