18/06/2012

Art Basel – Design Miami/Basel

Art Basel – Design Miami/Basel

Speaking about collectible design is almost a contradiction in terms. The idea of design we might have inherited from modernist ideology, differs significantly from the one seen at Design Miami/Basel. Even though the space offered by design galleries, a reality from complexities of industrial production, is surely an incredible platform for inquiry and experimentation, Design Miami/Basel doesn’t exactly leave you with your mouth open.

The line-up of this year’s fair was a mix between European and American galleries, extremely different in nature and attitude. The exhibitiors ranged from Gallerie Kreo, the ‘institution’ that raised to glory many of today’s most important designers, commercial giants such as Fendi or Italian jewels, like Milanese Nilufar, showing both modernist Italian furniture as well as pieces of contemporary designers, among whom the incredible Martino Gamper.
In a long list of exhibitors there were a few that stood out. The British Gallery Libby Sellers has shown a chess set project, insipired by a 1944 exhibition titled “The Imagery of Chess”. While Gallerie Kreo has dedicated its stand to lighting projects, one of the true highlights of the show was Galerie Ulrich Fiedler showing two Frederick Kiesler pieces designed for Peggy Guggenheim.

Among a very shy selection of contemporary pieces, two projects have to be mentioned. The first, and most obvious one, was Formafantasma’s performance Craftica, showcasing a collection of objects made with leather. The second one was Matali Crasset’s “Cutting” project exhibited by the Parisian Granville Gallery. “Cutting” is a collection of glass vases which take their shape from pieces of a tree personally chosen by the designer.

If collectible design, as much as a contradiction in terms, must also be an inevitable reality, maybe our culture might gain a bit more if the idea of design promoted by events like Design Miami/Basel would shift from a burgeois attitude towards the idea of design as a democratic place of research and critique.

Rujana Rebernjak 

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18/06/2012

Art Basel Round One

Art Basel Round One

In the last few days Art Basel was maybe the only place in the world where people could have the impression of entering an affluent bubble, where the global economic crisis seems to be just a fake. As each year, 300 among the best art galleries from all over the world were selected and enlisted to take part in the so-called ‘Olympics of the art world’. As each year, flow of art lovers and professionals crowded and enlivened the Swiss city to see the new trends of contemporary art market, while for seller’s happiness, international collectors got there mainly to grab super expensive artworks and fulfil their wishing list. And – thinking critically without being argumentative – it’s hard not to think about the economic mantra frequently used during crisis to critic the free market system “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”.

Strolling around the low ground of the fair, the one devoted to historical galleries, it’s easy to gape thanks to the high quality of the artworks exhibited. Mr. Gagosian, owner of the homonymous multinational gallery, presented an exhibition inside the booth with masterpieces by Picasso, Warhol and Damien Hirst, while other important (and perhaps less haughty) names of art market such as Werner, Lelong, Kartsen Greve, Marian Goodman, Sperone Westwater, Tucci Russo, Zwirner, Pace were at Art Basel in full splendour with works by Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Cy Twombly, Lawrence Weiner and the Italians Giuseppe Penone, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro and Alighiero Boetti (Arte Povera rocks!). Before going upstairs (HALL 2.1) we cannot avoid mentioning the striking orange-red-yellow piece by Rothko at Malborough for $78 million.


Once again, the first floor strictly dedicated to contemporary didn’t disappoint our expectations. Damien Hirst’s Stripper and Andreas Gursky’s five meters pictures Coocon II dominated at White Cube, while Ryan Gander and Neo Rauch were respectively the stars at Lisson Gallery and Eigen+Art’s booths. Chantal Crousel, Metro Pictures, Nagel and Marconi showed pieces by Anri Sala, Claire Fontaine – Gallery Neu had intriguing works by the collective too – Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Martha Rosler, Will Benedict, Markus Schinwald and Rosa Barba – even if the best Barba’s work was at Carlier Gebauer gallery. The stand devoted to Ettore Spalletti (De Alvear) didn’t pass unnoticed as the small size shots by Luigi Ghirri at Massimo Minini gallery. Among the youngest galleries Zero, gb agency and Plan B stood out thanks to the interesting artists proposed: Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Neil Beloufa, Roman Ondák, Ryan Gander (the young artist more represented at the fair) and Navid Nuur.

The 43rd edition of Art Basel, once again reinforced the idea that dealing with high art is not for everybody, but fortunately everybody could approach and discover it as a cultural matter – not only financial – since owning art is not the only possible way of enjoying it.

See you tomorrow to find out the most cultural and ‘Unlimited’ section of Art Basel.

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17/06/2012

Sunday Breakfast by Love For Breakfast

Sunday Breakfast by Love For Breakfast

The scent of flowers inebriates the air while the jam creaks on a rusk. It’s all it takes to start the day smiling.

Alessia Bossi from Love For Breakfast

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15/06/2012

Sustainable Fashion – An Impact For the Long Run

Sustainable Fashion – An Impact For the Long Run

Organic, ecologic, sustainable, fair trade, vintage, second hand, recycled, ethically produced – the list of words related to the environmental question in production as well as in fashion is long. The number of designers and brands taking environmental and social responsibility is growing, and organisations within the fashion industry are trying to start a movement of sustainability. Simultaneously, economical advisors like Jeremy Rifkin are asking the question: “Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?”


Sustainable design refers to production made with the consideration of how the product will affect its surroundings, both environmentally and socially, throughout its life span. Sustainability or “eco fashion” has been, and still is, a trending topic in the industry. It’s a complex matter and although many companies are seeking ways to change their customs, it’s really a question of motives. Making the production more effective or using methods kinder to the environment might be driven by the will to make an impact in the long run, but in some cases one could also talk about trends, market demands or economical forces.


For a development that meets today’s needs without compromising future generations, the fashion industry needs to embrace the concept and fully integrate a sustainable thinking into the way the business is done. Inspiration is to be found from famous concepts and ongoing discussions; Jeremy Rifkin created the concept of the Third Industrial Revolution where business owners become an important part of the energy game. Cross-industry relationships are creating new possibilities, and increased productivity also helps to ease the climate changes. Copenhagen Fashion Summit and the project NICE Fashion gathered last month many key stakeholders to one of the largest fashion summits, with the goal to enhance the importance of creating a sustainable future in one of the most polluting industries.

The discussion about CSR, sustainability and eco fashion has reached the point where scattered voices have to become collective initiatives. The industry stands before the challenge to find smart ways in production, and to create a business system that consciously and effectively decreases the negative impact on the surroundings. Like Kirsten Brodde from Greenpeace International puts it, it is a question of turning “eco fashion into simply fashion”.

Lisa Olsson Hjerpe – Image courtesy of Copenhagen Fashion Summit

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14/06/2012

The Antwerp Six – 33 Years Later

The Antwerp Six – 33 Years Later

Last weekend a new breed of Antwerpian couturiers were presented as The Royal Academy of Fine Arts revealed the Graduate collections, 33 years after the birth of the infamous Antwerp Six.

In the year of 1988, Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs and Marina Yee nailed Antwerp to the map as a fashion city. The group would eventually in the years of 80/81 graduate from the school, but in 88 they all squeezed together in a truck and headed for The London Fashion Fair where they presented their collections and marked a new era. Their aesthetics differences aside, the common ground was clearly the experimental silhouettes and conceptualism – no wonder Martin Margiela is often considered the 7th member of the family.


The international influence of the Antwerp Six is a complex and vast subject. However, while studying this years master’s students you soon realize that Van Noten, Margiela & Van Demeulemeester never really left the building.

Manon Kündig has channelled Van Noten’s sense of layering as well as colouring and printing. Ray Benedict Pador introduced a contemporary gothic man in the spirit of Van Deulemeester – with a pinch of S/M-culture. Finally, So Takayama sang her louanges to Margiela, as she sent her mannequins down the runway in exaggerated paper-like silhouettes.


Belgian designer Alexandra Verschueren, who graduated from the very same school in 2009, has acknowledged the Antwerp Six’s influence on the school and Belgian fashion community, “I think it definitely influenced me in a way. It always felt kind of weird to have six such great designers, since Belgium is such a small country.”

For the past 30 years the country has been a noted fashion nation in their own right, with a heritage that will continue to grow with every new generation of designers, as they interpret the days gone by.

Petsy von Köhler

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13/06/2012

Eyeglass Connoisseur

Eyeglass Connoisseur

‘Eyeglass Fitter’? This term, that Issei Mori is using for branding his new career with, may seem rather alien to us. He gave us a guide on it at his office in Aoyama, the fashionista shopping heaven crammed with well-known fashion maisons.

Issei Mori, born in Kyoto, learned the eyeglasses business through his uncle, a visionary in the field, who was among the first to offer the high-end European brands in Japan from early 80’s, and expanded his business to Tokyo by opening one of the most recognized shops called Abalo, where Issei was in charge of its operation.

“I must say that only with a proper fitting eyeglasses appear beautiful on your face. Even wearing the plano glasses, the design should be completed within the harmony between the glasses and each individual face,” Issei explained. Today, eyeglasses have gained a status of a hip item. That may be much better rather than to be a symbol of Ugly Betty. As glasses are an item to set directly on your face, people ought to pay as much attention to the perfect fit as they pay attention to their hair or make-up.

Originally born as medical equipment, eyeglasses have become more like mobile miniature architecture, to be fitted on the landscape of your face. From the measurement of visual acuity to choosing the best selection of suited shapes, colours and materials in the harmony with your face, all the way to the fitting, adjustment and repair… Yes, it may be very reassuring to have a personal consultant like Issei who combines the best properties of technical and aesthetic characteristics.

“Eyeglasses talk about your personality. Before I was more into the eyeglasses themselves, and was more inspired by their beauty and perfection as an object. Now I am more interested in the ‘conversation’ between eyeglasses and the face, the person, the way of living, the total coordination.”

Rather than his understated naming ‘Eyeglass Fitter’, we felt like to call him as ‘Eyeglass Connoisseur’.

Ai Mitsuda

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13/06/2012

The Editorial: Pretence. Plastic.

The Editorial: Pretence. Plastic.

It’s likely that we’ve all sat in a Louis Ghost chair. Every fighetto and fighetta in Milan has one or two ironically hanging around their “design” apartment. For me, the first time was a few years back at a beach house in Tuscany adorned with iridescent shells and pastel pictures of boats that seemed to exist only to forcibly remind everyone inside that “you’re on holiday, AT THE BEACH, goddamnit”. Two Louis Ghost chairs sat, noses upturned, at either end of a long table flanked by another six, less stately (but also clear plastic) Kartell chairs. “This place is POSH, goddamnit,” they said, hollowly.

For a piece of iconic “design” (an irksome classification, since everything man-made is designed, and is therefore design), the Louis Chair is incredibly derivative. It is an old, established form rendered in new material. It is invisible, yet its symbolic intentions are crystal clear. It was the perfect companion to the literal gaudiness of shells and pastel boats, as it is the perfect companion to a kitschy nail salon decorated with tropical plants and smelling of acetone, as it is the perfect companion to the generic posters and bad brochures of a second-rate travel agency. The Ghost chair is pretence in plastic. Nothing more.

And although the chair has lost must of the ooh-aah, genius gee-whiz novelty it once had, it has unequivocally become an instantly recognisable classic. An icon not only for Kartell and Starck, but for the 2000s and for contemporary Italian design. And it will be the first ugly thing your kids sell for 50¢ at a garage sale when you die.

So, to honour this extraordinary object, artist Simon Martin this week opened an exhibition at Collective Gallery in Edinburgh focusing squarely on it. And while Scotland may not be the design powerhouse Italy is (was?), its artists are positively on fire. Plus, a hearty mix of whisky and bluntness might be just what the doctor ordered to knock some sense back into Italian design.

The exhibition is brilliantly critical. Although we’ve all probably given the Ghost at least some thought –certainly most designers have– but what an enigma it is! Deliberate, shamelessly appropriated, trapped in the present and yet thoroughly a relic of the past. Ugly. Stunningly gorgeous. Packed with history. Meaningless. In a short documentary, Martin juxtaposes the Ghost with plastic (ceramic?) lawn gnomes and their accompanying tree-trunk tables, African headrests, and a work by Donald Judd. Plastic wood. Wooden box. Box as symbol. Symbol as chair. And what it all does is call into question the very reasons for which we’d value such an object in the first place. It is the purest, clearest expression of our obsessive yet unthinking attachment to symbol. Perhaps ever. Why this objectively ugly chair has any value at all is pure sociological, anthropological, psychological magic.

While he may be a massive sellout (good businessman?), Philippe Starck is nothing if not an excellent designer. A designer who is extremely easy to hate for unleashing loads of ugly things on the world, but a very, very clever one, indeed. Maybe his snarky materialism–his oft-repeated mantra, after all, is “everything I make is absolutely unnecessary”–has actually been about coming to grips with the ills of materialism. Just maybe.

Tag Christof

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12/06/2012

Heatherwick Studio at V&A

Heatherwick Studio at V&A

Thomas Heatherwick is one of those creatives that you can’t actually fit in any precise category. He became quite famous in design-ish circles with his Spun chair produced by the Italian manufacturer Magis. When it comes to a wider acclaim, it only came about when he was charged with designing the British pavilion for the 2010 Shanghai Expo, and earlier this year with the re-design of the London bus. Not that designers ever become superstars outside of their closed world, but that says a lot about the knowledge wider public has of the discipline.


Fortunately there are some institutions that recognize the quality and importance of people that shape our visual and material world. Hence, when Victoria and Albert Museum announced a grand retrospective of Heatherwick’s work, it really came as a relief.

Entitled “Designing the Extraordinary”, the exhibition runs through almost twenty years of professional career that started with a small studio Thomas, opened in 1994, after graduating at Royal College of Art. The exhibition has been set up using primarily models and objects the designer has accumulated in his studio in all these years, spanning from small scale object to architectural models.


Heatherwick is extremely difficult to classify under the limited boundaries of a single profession, since he has given shape to almost every kind of tridimensional objects. Gaining himself some lament coming from the architectural community, he has successfully designed both buildings, pavilions, shops, busses, chairs, benches and tables, giving each object unique quality and a distinctive signature. In a moment when disciplines collapse and design is an over-abused word applied to describe almost anything, a wider public can finally confront itself with a design excellence.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Heatherwick Studio

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11/06/2012

Antwerp SHOW2012

Antwerp SHOW2012

Founded in 1663, the oldest of its kind in Europe and the starting point for Martin Margiela, Haider Ackermann, Peter Pilotto, Dries van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester (the two last-mentioned also being part of the far-famed Antwerp Six) among others, the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts is a school with a resourceful fashion department where creativity comes first. 7 – 9th of June it was time for SHOW2012, the final runway for the eleven Master Students about to graduate.


Outside of the trend hub where eventful glamour is represented in addition to the actual fashion, Antwerp is a city with its own profile. Fashion people are seen as individuals interested in the society and ethical issues aside from the aesthetics, and fashion is to be seen in the largest of senses. Maureen De Clercq, teacher in fashion design at the Academy, says that “the atmosphere is creative, dynamic and has a lot of energy”. The industry people come to the city to see the final runway shows, to be surrounded by and to be a part of that feeling.


As a school, the Academy focuses a lot on experimentation, improvisation and innovation, as well as on the creative talent and the students’ ability to express themselves through their drawings. As the viewer has to be kept interested and the media pushes out new trends, these focal points are to foster future designers to see above previous horizons and turn well-known concepts in their heads. Located near the industry but somehow isolated from the fashion hysteria, Antwerp and the Royal Academy with its students seem to have found their own rhythm within the industry, mediating a pragmatic calm where the explosive details are within the arts – which are blooming.


The SHOW2012 collections had extravagant details, often leaving conventional to the side. Through the presentations the collections called to evoke emotions and express something outside the garments. The graduates showcased their work by presenting the abilities of creativity, detailing and innovative techniques, before being thrown into the “real world”. With Antwerp’s resume and history in mind one can expect to come across the graduate names again – behind the name of a fashion house, scaled down or in their full blossom of extremity.

See a complete runway video from SHOW2012 here.


Lisa Olsson Hjerpe

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11/06/2012

Gerhard Richter | Panorama

Gerhard Richter | Panorama

Panorama is much more than an exhibition. It is the first chronological and comprehensive retrospective arranged, thanks to the collaboration between three of the main European art institutions, to retrace Gerhard Richter‘s entire career and celebrate his 80th birthday.

After Tate Modern in London and Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the traveling show covering fifty years of Richter’s oeuvre – accompanied by an unmissable book with essays and interviews of international critics and curators -, is now on view at Centre Pompidou in Paris and will run until the 24th September.

The versatile artist, born in Dresden in the former East Germany in 1932 and moved to the West during the 60′s, is widely regarded as one of the most important painters at work today. Well known for his ability to reinvent and transform his art, Richter has worked with traditional and new media. With sculptures, drawings, photographs and by painting over photographs, he is still – and unconventionally – remaining loyal to painting as a timeless way of expression: «painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human».


Many previous exhibitions have been devoted to the German Master until today with the aim of plumbing the depths of his work and focusing on different aspects of his research, but, as stated by the title in itself, this show wants to go beyond. Including the so-called Photo-paintings, figurative and abstract works, land and seascapes, glass sculptures and mirror works, drawings and photographs, portraits, Greys and Colour Charths, Panorama encompasses the whole archive of Richter’s achievements.

Gerhard Richter’s retrospective helps to underline his artistic transitions: producing paintings through the use of an episcope on the basis of his own photographs, erasing figurative paintings by covering them with a layer of gray paint or using painting as a way of inheriting a tradition and revealing his own intimacy and historical experiences. From the 60’s to today the artist has been placed in the camps of minimalism, conceptual and political art, passing through the emergence of abstraction, always following his idea of letting a thing come, rather than creating it.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Centre Pompidou is curated by Alfred Pacquement, Camille Morineau and Lucia Pesatane, with colleagues in London (Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey from Tate) and Berlin (Udo Kittelmann and Dorothee Brill at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

Monica Lombardi

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