Jasper Morrison – Early works’ brings together the early works of the celebrated British designer, from his formative years at Kingston College, London, at the dawn of the 1980s, to his collaboration with internationally-renowned publishers such as Vitra and Cappellini less than a decade later. Supported by a rich archive produced by the Jasper Morrison Studio, the exhibition brings together prototypes, studies, commissioned pieces and first editions. It’s a rare opportunity to discover the genesis of the work of this genius designer, now recognised worldwide yet so discreet, whose ‘Supernormal’ creations can be found in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the MoMa in New York.
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To mark the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ‘Breaking the wall’ exhibition pays tribute to a generation of non-conformist designers who set out to ‘liberate design’. At the turn of the 1980s, in Germany (formerly the FRG), young artists born in the immediate post-war period shattered the principles inherited from the Bauhaus. Critics of functionalism and ‘good form’, they produced objects on the borderline between art and design, with a strong symbolic and political dimension. Their motto: ‘form follows free will’. Using recycled materials and construction materials such as concrete and steel, they create a post-industrial aesthetic based on a Do it yourself approach and a desire to break down the barriers between disciplines. Resolutely iconoclastic and technically and formally inventive, their work quickly found an echo in a Europe that was about to witness one of the major events of the twentieth century.
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Through forty works by international creators, the “Débordements” exhibition questions the singularities of the vase as an object and its place in the artistic field from the end of the 1970s to the present day.
A trophy celebrating victory, a funeral urn or a tool for transporting and preserving food in antiquity, the vase is gradually asserting itself as the ultimate art object. It is an artifact that testifies to a particular aesthetic research. From the 17th century, when people began to garnish vases with flowers, its function was no longer exclusively decorative. During the contemporary period, artists and designers shatter academic forms inherited from antiquity. The vase now constitutes a true exercise in style and a formidable field of experimentation.
Every vase is inherently unfinished. Having to endure existing naked, it is subjected to a pattern of alternation of fullness and emptiness, depending on whether it is garnished or not, while its content is constantly renewed to the rhythm of the withering flowers. More than the living, it is the spectacle of disappearance that the vase celebrates. The cut flower draws its beauty from its ability to preserve appearance in death – to “keep up” – and if the experience of the sublime cannot be born from an empty vase, it is expressed in its ability to preserve, for a time, the fleeting image of life. The permanence of the vase collides irremediably with the ephemeral nature of the plant. By surviving the flower, the vase symbolically marks the domination of Culture over Nature.
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The exhibition “Josef Hoffmann / Ettore Sottsass: Secessions” explores the relationship between two of the greatest figures in architecture and design.
While Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) is considered one of the fathers of the modern movement, Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) was one of the first to question its foundations. Beyond this apparent antagonist, there is a deep link between these two creators of genius: it is driven by the same refusal of academicism that Sottsass undertook, at the turn of the 1960s, a long work of deconstruction of the principles established by Hoffmann at the end of the 19th century. Where Hoffmann spoke out against official salon art dominated by styles of the past and historicism, Sottsass rejects the impoverished language of a modernism locked in its own codes.
More than half a century apart, both, in their own way, decided to “secession”, turning the history of design and decorative arts upside down.
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Tuileries Garden – Stand 9
Artists featured:
Martin Szekely, Oscar Jespers, Robert Wilson, Ginbande, Gisèle Buthod-Garçon, Dan Friedman, Edmaund Kesting, Jasper Morrison, Lia Rochas-Paris, Rico and Rosemarie Baltensweiler, Christian Duc, François Arnal
The Romain Morandi gallery is pleased to organize the first exhibition in France of the works of Beat Frank (b. 1949), a major figure in Swiss design since the mid-1980s.
On this occasion, she presents a unique set of furniture made to order for the convent of La Tourette, a modernist masterpiece by Le Corbusier.
Created at the invitation of the French Ministry of Culture in 1994, the tables and chairs by Beat Frank intended for the refectory of the convent question the specificities of the building, listed as a UNESCO world heritage site.
It took several site visits for Beat Frank to immerse himself in the place and thus design furniture that perfectly echoed the architecture. Forms reduced to their simplest expression, brutalist textures and verticality characterize the production of someone who considers the object as a “utilitarian sculpture”.
To understand this proposition, the exhibition returns to the furniture that the designer developed within the Atelier Vorsprung which he founded with Andreas Lehmann in 1984 (their collaboration lasted until 1990). Beat Frank then designs a set of tables, chairs, bookcases, consoles, in wood or metal, whose elements fit naturally into each other.
His “four-part armchair” reflects this research: how to design a seat from four identical elements? An object that folds, can be transported and becomes a voluminous and comfortable body? This saw the light of day after more than a year of study. The “Lesemobile”, a true nomadic workstation, will require more than four years of research. “From paper to space”, Beat Frank pays close attention to the quality of manufacturing, of which he supervises all stages. In order to maintain control of his production, his pieces are published in very small series in the immediate vicinity of the city of Bern where he resides.
Beat Frank’s works are now in the collections of the Vitra Design Museum and the Pinakothek in Munich in Germany, the Landesmuseum and the Design Museum in Zürich, Switzerland, and the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain in France.
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On the occasion of the release of the book “Chess Design”, the Romain Morandi Gallery will give its first exhibition to chess games by artists and designers. In the most perfect spirit of the work, the “Chess Design” exhibition will endeavor to connect the different movements which have driven creation from 1890 to the present day (Constructivism, Bauhaus, Art Deco, American Craft, Brutalism, postmodernism, etc.) through 32 chess games by major creators of the 20th century: Juna Zdenek, Josef Hartwig, Jean-Boris Lacroix, Raphael Giarusso, René-Jean Caillette, Carl Aubock, Victor Gentils, Jacob Asbaeck, Pierre Cardin, Max Sollner, Walter & Moretti, Arman, Pucci de Rossi, Javier Mariscal, Michael Graves, etc. In order to nourish this dialogue, certain games will be presented accompanied by furniture – tables and armchairs – in the style of small chess rooms. And visitors are invited to take a seat around the chessboard to play a game!
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Artists featured:
Pierre Charpin, Dan Friedman, Elizabeth de Portzamparc, Gustav Stickley, Nestor Perkal, Josef Hoffmann, Andrea Branzi, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pierre Malherbet, Emmanuelle Torck & Emmanuelle Noirot, Martin Szekely, Elisabeth Garouste & Mattia Bonetti, Alessandro Mendini