Born in Rockford, Illinois, Virgil Abloh was an artist, architect, engineer, creative director, artistic director, industrial designer, fashion designer, musician, DJ, and philanthropist. After earning a degree in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he completed a Master’s degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago. At IIT, while studying a design curriculum devised by Mies van der Rohe, Abloh began to craft the principles of his art practice. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago presented a major traveling survey of Abloh’s work in summer 2019—one of the highest attended exhibitions in the museum’s history. Abloh was the Chief Creative Director and founder of Off-White™ and Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton.
Atelier Van Lieshout rose to fame with projects that travel between the world of minimalist design and non-functional art, including sculptures and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.
Atelier Van Lieshout is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout. Van Lieshout graduated from the Rotterdam Art Academy and, in 1995, the artist founded his studio and has been working solely under the studio’s name ever since. The studio moniker exists in Van Lieshout’s practice as a methodology towards undermining the myth of the artistic genius.
Over the past three decades, Van Lieshout has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design and architecture. Van Lieshout dissects systems, be it society as a whole or the human body; he experiments, looks for alternatives, takes exhibitions as experiments for recycling and has even declared an independent state named AVL-Ville (2001), located in the port of Rotterdam. All of which are conducted within Van Lieshout’s signature style of provocation – be it political or material. Indeed, his works share a number of recurring themes, motives and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex and death. His prolific sculpture, Domestikator (2015), is an apt example, having caused controversy before being placed at the Louvre in Jardin des Tuilleries. It was later adopted by the Centre Pompidou, where it was shown during the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain in 2017.
Van Lieshout combines an imaginative aesthetic and ethic with a spirit of entrepreneurship; his work has sparked movements in the fields of architecture and ecology, and has been internationally celebrated, exhibited and published. Van Lieshout’s works have been included in the Gwangju, Venice, Yokohama, Christchurch, Shanghai and São Paulo Bienniales. Atelier Van Lieshout have won many awards since 1991, including the prix de Rome in 1995.
Considered one of the most influential artist-designers of the early 21st century, Maarten Baas straddles the boundaries between art and design. Known for his rebellious, intellectual, theatrical and artistic style, his oeuvre integrates conceptual art, craftsmanship, installation, public space and performance.
Born in 1978 in Arnsberg, Germany, Baas graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002, occupying a unique position in the field.
Drawing upon his graduate research on beauty and imperfection, Baas created his debut significant work Smoke, whereby he charcoals objects and preserves resin, experimenting with nature in constant flux. His Clay series expresses artistic vulnerability, with each piece being handmade. Baas’ most renowned work, Real Time series – 12-hour films of performances indicating the time – combine theatre, art, film and design. These works gave him instant worldwide recognition. His work is in numerous private and major museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK, Les Arts Décoratifs Paris, France, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Pinakothek der Moderne – Die Neue Sammlung, Munich, DE and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, AU.
In 2009, he was named ‘Designer of the Year’ at Design Basel/ Miami. In 2012, the New York Times listed both Smoke and Clay in its ‘Top 25 Design Classics of the Future’. In 2016, Baas won the Artprize for his Real Time: Sweepers Clock.
Baas has also worked for brands like Louis Vuitton, Swarovski, Hermès, Dior, Isabel Marant, KLM and Schiphol Airport, Dom Ruinart and Berluti.
In 2017, his first monograph was published, titled Hide & Seek, coinciding with a major museum solo show at the Groninger Museum, Netherlands, that still travels to museums worldwide.
“I like to see objects as living organisms, imagine them coming alive and being able to surprise you with their behaviour. I want to create objects with my hands; then I can give them my personality. I turn them into communicative objects that can arouse one’s feelings and imagination. In short, what I want to create are objects with a fictional or fantasy element that allow you to escape everyday life,” says Nacho Carbonell.
Carbonell is known for his tactile approach to sculpture which plays with textures, experimental techniques, and natural materials.
Born in Spain in 1980 and now based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Carbonell works alongside his team of designers and artists in an open warehouse. He graduated in 2003 from Cardenal Herrera University in Spain and went on to study at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Upon graduating, he created collections such as Evolution in 2009, which won him a nomination for Beazley Design of the Year from the Design Museum in London.
In 2010, a year after being named a Designer of the Future at Design Miami/ Basel, he presented This Identity, redefining his current style of organic forms and rough and colourful textures. His pieces are part of private collections and museums around the world.
Co-founded in 1984 by brothers Fernando (1961) and Humberto (1953) Campana, the studio Campana has achieved international recognition for its furniture design and intriguing pieces. In 2019, the studio celebrated its 35th anniversary acknowledged as a pioneer of disruptive Design, which led them to create a groundbreaking language in their field.
Deeply rooted in Brazilian culture and traditions, their work carries universal values at its core, such as freedom and human dignity, creating their identity through life experiences. By incorporating the idea of transformation and reinvention, their creative process raises everyday materials to nobility. Brazilian characteristics – such as the abundance of colours, mixtures, and creative chaos – bring the triumph of simple solutions, poetically.
Based in São Paulo, studio Campana is constantly investigating new possibilities within Design: from furniture making to architecture, landscaping, fashion, scenography, and more. Bridging disciplines and encouraging the exchange of expertise among communities and artists are vital sources of inspiration, fresh repertoire, and free-thinking. Working with multiple brands and industries allows them to combine the best of craftsmanship, sustainable production practices and state-of-the-art technologies.
Born in Kansas in 1932, Wendell Castle received two degrees from the University of Kansas, one in industrial design in 1958 and the other in sculpture in 1961. He moved to Rochester, New York to teach at the School for American Crafts and established a permanent studio in the area that is still in operation today. He reinvented himself for nearly six decades.
Often credited as the founding father of the American Art Furniture movement, Castle has redefined sculpture and design by seamlessly merging the two into one discipline. He created unique pieces that blur the distinction between design and sculpture. Castle’s organic and whimsical approach to sculpture incorporates his own invented technique of carving into stacked laminated wood known as lamination. His furniture designs for residential clients, public spaces, and a number of churches represent a unique exploration of the qualities and possibilities of wood and fiberglass.
His work can be found in the permanent collections of more than forty museums and cultural institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the White House in Washington, D.C. Moreover, he has been the recipient of many honours and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.
Vincenzo De Cotiis is an Italian artist who is considered a protagonist of contemporary collectible design. De Cotiis’ universe is one where art meets function, fuelled by parallelisms of space and time, cultural layerings and quantum leaps.
Vincenzo De Cotiis was born in 1958 in Gonzaga, Italy. He studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and founded his studio in Milan where he lives and works.
As an architect, De Cotiis creates sculptural spaces that evoke physical and intellectual experiences on the cusp of art and architecture, defying traditional categorisation between artistic disciplines. A fertile dialogue between the old and the new is a cornerstone of his work; history breaks free into spaces where the line between past and future blends.
De Cotiis seeks new manifestations that can conflate archaic idioms with futuristic expressions. His creations are born out of an assembly of recovered materials and reflective, futuristic surfaces, appearing evocative in their final form. His work is a form of art and design that is not replicable. It represents a winding path that often doubles back upon itself, manifested through the materiality of his countless works.
De Cotiis’ work was presented at the Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City, the Ca’ d’Oro on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, and the Powerlong Art Museum in Shanghai. His installation art, Ode, will join the permanent collection of the FENIX Museum of Migration in Rotterdam.
Selected pieces are available through Vincenzo De Cotiis Gallery in Milan, Carpenters Workshop Gallery, and at leading global art and design fairs including Design Miami, Dubai Design Week, PAD, TEFAF, The Armory Show and Zona Maco.
“My approach is about imbuing bronze with warmth and vitality by using scarification techniques and visual motifs inspired by the high art of cultures and communities with which I come into contact,” Ingrid Donat.
Ingrid Donat is a French artist born to a Swedish mother and a Reunionese father. This cultural blend has shaped the singularity of her art and creative aesthetic, characterised by craftsmanship and a unique fusion of traditional techniques and Art Deco aesthetics.
Raised in Sweden, Ingrid Donat returned to Paris to study at the École des Beaux Arts in 1975 where she met with Sylva Bernt who guided her in the field of sculpture. During the 80’s she became friends with the sculptor Diego Giacometti who encouraged her to create her own works. This kickstarted Ingrid Donat’s career in the art world and solidified her position as a pioneering figure for women finding freedoms through artistic expression at the time. Ingrid Donat has been an important figure in the design world for several decades and her collaboration with Carpenters Workshop Gallery spans over 15 years, cementing her status as a leading artist in her field.
Ingrid Donat integrates sculptural practices into the production of functional pieces. She builds a vocabulary that is enriched by bronze, wood, parchment and textiles with patterns inspired by scarification techniques. Ingrid Donat’s work is rooted in the tradition of French decorative arts and the influence of her own diverse cultural heritage and the world cultures she encounters, while her characters and intricate patterns are influenced by the work of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Armand-Albert Rateau. The harmonious integration of traditional techniques with contemporary sensibilities highlights the artist’s mastery of the soldering and engraving that adorn her pieces.
Ingrid Donat has showcased her work in numerous prestigious exhibitions and fairs globally. Notable exhibitions include Dark Fantasy at Carpenters Workshop Gallery x UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles (2019), Rituals at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in San Francisco (2019) and Dysfunctional at Galleria Giorgio Franchetti Alla Ca’ D’Oro in Venice (2019). She has also been featured in fairs such as Art021 in Shanghai (2019), TEFAF New York Spring (2019), Design Miami/Basel (2018) and PAD London (2018). Earlier, she participated in Origins at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York (2016) and Retrospective Exhibition 10 Years of Collectible Design in Mitry-Mory, France (2016), which is where her atelier is located and the year she began working with Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Her extensive career includes exhibitions at Design Miami/Miami (2010), Sotheby’s at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire (2010) and numerous appearances at the Pavilion of Art & Design in both London and Paris from 2008 to 2014.
Vincent Dubourg is a French artist born in 1977. Dubourg’s sculptural furniture makes contemporary allusions to traditional methods of cabinet making. This evokes a nostalgic sense of the familiar, which he simultaneously distorts with his fresh approach to materials and techniques.
Dubourg poetically fuses the crafts of glassblowing, wood-bending, and metal-casting to bring simple forms to life. In Napoleon A Trotinette, the solid form of a bureau is harmoniously combined with the graceful curves of bronze branches.
Dubourg’s designs introduce motion to stationary furniture. Vent Sur La Table whirls bronze and branches upwards as though freed from the constraints of gravity. Indeed, Dubourg offers a new perspective to furniture design, often subverting classic functional forms.
In Commode à Nouvelle Zélande, he flips a bar so that it rests on rows of up-turned glasses and bottles. Another piece in this series, Plancher à Nouvelle Zélande, sees shelves fly from the wall as if making an escape.
Dubourg’s conceptual twists add a surreal element to traditional craftsmanship, though he never relinquishes his devotion for the search of perfection.
Born in 1974, Mathieu Lehanneur is a French designer on the forefront of the international design scene. Mathieu Lehanneur has a multi-disciplinary approach to creativity: his projects stretch the realms of product design and object to architecture, craft, and technology.
His designs are inspired by nature yet push the limits of design by exploring new technologies. He crosses boarders by combining design, science, technology, and art in projects that aim to achieve maximum welfare for human beings. Air, water, light, and sound are amongst his favorite materials to create his science-inspired humanistic projects.
He considers human beings as complex structures who need more than chairs but need air to breathe, sustainable food, good health, and love to live better lives. Born in 1974, he graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris.
His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and at the Design Museum Gent. He has also designed interiors for Saint-Hilaire Church in Melle, France; for Château Borély in Marseille, France; for the Hôpital des Diaconesses in Paris, France; and for the Café ArtScience in Boston.
Video Credit: Financial Times and Lombard Odier.
“If you’re an architect, your world is a building, a graphic designer works on a newspaper or a wall, while a landscape architect plays with nature itself. I try and draw all these worlds together and see what happens when they meet,” Frederik Molenschot.
Frederik Molenschot, born in 1981, is an artist and designer from the Netherlands who describes himself as a landscape sculptor. Although not limited to one material, Molenschot is renowned for using bronze to create robust and large sculptures that navigate the natural, industrial, urban and cosmic realms.
Molenschot, a graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven who currently lives and works in Zaandam, is part of the Dutch Design Movement. His degree was earned with studies in man and public space, where he focused on connecting people and their environments.
Molenschot’s passion for making things started in his childhood; both of his parents’ families owned a factory and he also grew up next to one. He founded Studio Molen in 2005 and is a blur of constant energy, forever creating and developing new ideas and inspiring people. Working out of his studio, Molenschot crafts his pieces by hand and displays incredible diversity. He has a deep interest in the artificial and natural elements of our surroundings, and his aim is to transport the viewer’s senses to a new level.
Molenschot is best known for his cast bronze lighting structures, particularly his body of work City light, which he hand-shaped into detailed formations to channel and direct light. At his core, however, he is a passionate artist and polaroid photographer, often creating 3D works that translate his stories into objects. His artistic practice began in 2000, after creating Atlas, a diary of projects of and materials.
Frederik Molenschot has exhibited his work in several significant international exhibitions and fairs. In 2017, his pieces were featured in the Art Light exhibitions at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in both New York and London. His 2016 exhibitions included Zona Maco in Mexico City, Design Days Dubai, PAD Paris, ArtMonte-Carlo in Monaco, Art Light in Paris and Design Miami in the USA. In 2015, Molenschot showcased at Art Genève in Switzerland, Masterpiece in London and Guild in Cape Town. The previous year, his work appeared at BRAFA in Brussels, Design Shanghai, the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris and multiple shows in Dubai. Additionally, in 2013 and 2012, he participated in the Pavilion of Art & Design in Paris, Masterpiece London, Design Miami/Basel and Design Days Dubai. Earlier highlights include his participation in Design Miami/Miami in 2011 and the inaugural show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris the same year.
Rick Owens grew up in Porterville, a small town in California’s San Joaquin valley.
Drawn to pre-gentrified Hollywood and L.A.’s punk underground in the 80s, Owens studied painting at what is now Otis College of Art and Design. He then switched to Los Angeles Trade Technical-College to learn patternmaking and draping.
Owens launched his eponymous line in 1994, operating out of a raw storefront off Hollywood Boulevard. Photographer Corinne Day shot Kate Moss in his clothing for Carine Roitfeld’s Vogue Paris, which caught the attention of Anna Wintour. Consequently, American Vogue underwrote his first runway show, in New York, and the legendary French fur label Revillon hired him to modernise their centuries-old house. Owens also launched menswear in 2002, which he continues to show bi-annually at Paris men’s fashion week.
Owens moved to Paris with his wife and partner, Michèle Lamy, in 2003, setting up his home and atelier inside a historic five-storey building that previously served as offices for former French president François Mitterrand. His runway collections have been mounted in Paris since then.
Owens founded Owenscorp in France in 2004, making the label completely independently owned.
Diffusion collections that complement the original label for women and men include RICKOWENSLILIES and DRKSHDW. In addition to being carried in specialty boutiques worldwide, the first Rick Owens flagship opened in the Palais Royal of Paris in 2006 and additional stand-alone stores have followed globally. An e-commerce store was launched in 2013.
In July of 2005 he introduced a furniture collection. Using raw plywood, marble, and moose antlers, the collection is inspired by his favourite shapes from Eileen Gray to Brâncuși to California skateparks. The furniture collection has since been shown at the Musée d’art Moderne and Le Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
In 2002, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) honoured Owens with the Perry Ellis award for emerging talent. He was awarded the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Fashion Design in 2007, as well as The Rule Breakers Award from the Fashion Group International. In 2017, he received the CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award. Owens was named Menswear Designer of the Year at the CFDA fashion awards 2019, in addition to receiving the Fashion Group International Superstar Award later that same year. in 2021, Owens was awarded the WWD Honours Award for Womenswear Designer of the Year.
Owens has authored 6 books — L’ai-je bien descendu? (2007), Rick Owens (2011), Rick Owens: Furniture (2017), a limited edition box set titled Subhuman Inhuman Superhuman (2017), as well as Rick Owens photographed by Danielle Levitt and Legaspi by Rick Owens, both released in September 2019 by Rizzoli.
December 2017 saw the opening of a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Owens’ work at La Triennale di Milano.
In 2019, Owens designed the costumes and makeup for Hiroshi Sugimoto’s production of At the Hawks Well, presented at Opéra Garnier in Paris.
Random International is a postdigital art group exploring the impact of technological development on the human condition. Experimental by nature, Random International’s practice is fuelled by research and scientific discovery. The group aims to broaden the question of what it is to be alive today by experimenting with how we connect — to different kinds of life, to different views of the world, and to one another.
Artists Florian Ortkrass and Hannes Koch were both born in 1975 in Germany and met at Brunel University before going on to complete their Masters at the Royal College of Art. They founded Random International following their graduation from the RCA in 2005.
Nearing almost two decades since the studio’s inception, the focus of Random International’s artistic practice has continuously evolved, and today embraces sculpture, performance, and installation, often on an architectural scale. Their highly collectable work creates a bridge between the human, the digital and the architectural scales by creating monumental works that offer their audiences personal and instinctive experiences.
Their Swarm Study series explores the perceived embodiment of collective intelligence as expressed solely through movement, and the instinctual connections this can provoke in the human visual system. Inspired by the enigmatic and acrobatic efficiency of starlings’ murmurations in flight, the work simulates and disseminates natural flocking behaviour at its most basic algorithmic form, embodying it in light.
Their critically acclaimed installation Rain Room is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as the Sharjah Art Foundation and has also been exhibited at London’s Barbican (2012); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2015/2018); and MoCA Busan (2019). Editions of Rain Room have been permanently installed at the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE in 2018 and the Jackalope Collection in Melbourne, respectively (2019).
Their work is also found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum London, the Maxine & Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art Detroit, the YUZ Foundation Shanghai, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art LA.
DRIFT reconnects humanity with nature through technology. DRIFT manifests the phenomena and hidden properties of nature with the use of technology in order to learn from the Earth’s underlying mechanisms and to re-establish our connection to it.
Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta founded DRIFT in 2007 after graduating from the Design Academy in Eindhoven. With a multi-disciplinary team of 64, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances. They first collaborated on Gordijn’s graduation project, Fragile Future, which saw a number of ball-shaped LED lamps with real dandelion seeds glued onto them, giving the bulbs a flower-like appearance. With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s work illuminates the parallels between man-made and natural structures through deconstructive, interactive and innovative processes. The artists raise fundamental questions about what life is, and explore a positive scenario for the future. Fragile Future turned out to be the most successful project of DRIFT so far.
All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. However, the confined parametres of a museum or a gallery does not always do justice to a body of work. Rather, architecture or the public sphere can often help it to reach its potential. DRIFT brings people, space and nature on to the same frequency, inspiring audiences to reconnect to our planet.
DRIFT has realised numerous exhibitions and created projects from around the world. Their work has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London UK, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the UTA Artist Space, Atlanta, GA, the Garage Museum, Moscow, Russia and the Mint Museum, Charlotte, CA among others. Their work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the San Francisco Musem of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK.
They duo have won many awards around the world for their Fragile Future collection, including the 1st Prize Stichting ArtiParti in 2006 as well as the International Design Prize ‘Lights of the future’ for the German Design Council. In 2010, their Concrete Chandelier won a prize at the Moët-Hennessy Pavillion of Art and Design. Their work is also widely praised within the Netherlands, where they won the 1st Prize of the ZomerExpo at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and the Finest Light Sculpture Prize for Interieur, Kortrijk. Their work Flylight was rewarded with Best Piece of Arte Laguna, in Venice. More recently, in 2019 they were selected as Designer of the Year with the Dezeen Awards for their work Franchise Freedom.
Studio Job is a ground-breaking art and design studio based in the Netherlands and Milan. Led by Job Smeets (b.1969), a pioneer of contemporary conceptual and sculptural art and design, he founded Studio Job in 1998 in the renaissance spirit, combining traditional and modern techniques to produce once-in-a-lifetime objects. Smeets leads a team of highly talented craftspeople to produce art pieces, projects and products in their atelier in the Netherlands. The studio works across art, interiors and product design with a vast range of high profile clients, galleries, and brands.
In the Studio Job atelier, a vast range of crafts are practiced, where traditional craftspeople such as sculptors and specialists in casting bronze and making stained-glass windows and hand-painting work alongside experts adept in using lasers and 3D printing. In both the atelier and Job’s creative studio, technique, science, design and art come together in their work as examples of what can be described as Gesamtkunstwerk – a total art work or an all embracing art form.
Studio Job are pioneers of contemporary conceptual and sculptural design. The results range from bronze artwork in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, to the national stamp of the Netherlands featuring the Dutch King (forty million pieces produced), the unique life-size bronze sculptures on Miami Beach, to the one-off Wunderkammer curiosity cabinet produced for Swarovski in Innsbruck, Austria.
All Studio Job projects are distinguished by a love of detail, freedom of expression, and functional art. With more than 400 exhibitions and solo shows around the world, Studio Job’s work can be found in most important museum collections. Their iconic, heraldic and cartoon-like sculptures are prized by collectors world-wide. Proclaimed one of the most influential studios by the Financial Times, Studio Job are passionate about building up an oeuvre that is becoming increasingly extravagant in its details and increasingly personal.
Studio Job work across many areas including art, design, fashion, architecture and interiors having worked with a vast range of high profile clients including sculptures for Gufram, Barneys and Land Rover, set design for Viktor & Rolf and Mika, and product collections for many brands such as Swatch, Alessi, Moooi and Pepsi to name a few. In 2017 Studio Job teamed up with Italian manufacturer Seletti to form the joint brand BLOW producing products in their pop spirit with a radical twist. Inspired by the city, 2019 Job Smeets opened his new base in Porta Venezia, Milan joining the new wave of Italian post-modernists.
Job Smeets is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most influential players within design and art. His highly collectable work creates a bridge between object and product by merging functional art with ground-breaking concepts.
Charles Trevelyan was born in 1974 in Australia. With a background in material science and engineering, Charles navigated a gradual transition from the sciences to the arts before finding a natural home for his work at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in 2007. Along the way, Charles developed a style of work that references a diverse spectrum of influences including the natural textures and colour palettes that surrounded him during his upbringing in Australia, cellular and crystalline morphology that emerged in the electron microscopy projects from his earlier career to more recent interests such as the extraordinary range of intriguing patterns found in aerial photographs that result from unintentional interactions between industrial and agricultural land usage and natural landforms.
Eschewing traditional methods due to his unusual path into making, Charles embraces material and process exploration to develop furniture, lighting and design objects inspired by the varying ways in which people respond to the textures, colours and structures of the natural world. He’s interested in the manner in which small fluctuations shape our perception of form and the inferences we draw and seeks resonance points on continuums of variation where an object can transition from unbalanced or awkward to graceful through a process of incremental alterations in a given characteristic. With each creation, he seeks a balance between ambiguity and familiarity, interlinking form, colour, and texture to provoke curiosity in the observer.
Mostly favouring physical models and prototypes over sketching, Charles alternates between material experimentation and making with each aspect feeding back into the other in an incremental developmental process that is deliberately detached from any notion of a final destination or function. He creates test pieces, models and maquettes using an array of materials and processes in his studio, bringing together the physicality of the hand-worked sculpting, casting and texturing materials with the detail and precision of digital fabrication techniques. The new Gyre table lamp series encapsulates many of these elements of his practice, combining a careful study of sculptural form with an intensive process of experimentation to develop a unique self-coloured texture that mimics the variety found in natural textures.
Born in Rockford, Illinois, Virgil Abloh was an artist, architect, engineer, creative director, artistic director, industrial designer, fashion designer, musician, DJ, and philanthropist. After earning a degree in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he completed a Master’s degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago. At IIT, while studying a design curriculum devised by Mies van der Rohe, Abloh began to craft the principles of his art practice. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago presented a major traveling survey of Abloh’s work in summer 2019—one of the highest attended exhibitions in the museum’s history. Abloh was the Chief Creative Director and founder of Off-White™ and Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton.
Atelier Van Lieshout rose to fame with projects that travel between the world of minimalist design and non-functional art, including sculptures and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.
Atelier Van Lieshout is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout. Van Lieshout graduated from the Rotterdam Art Academy and, in 1995, the artist founded his studio and has been working solely under the studio’s name ever since. The studio moniker exists in Van Lieshout’s practice as a methodology towards undermining the myth of the artistic genius.
Over the past three decades, Van Lieshout has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design and architecture. Van Lieshout dissects systems, be it society as a whole or the human body; he experiments, looks for alternatives, takes exhibitions as experiments for recycling and has even declared an independent state named AVL-Ville (2001), located in the port of Rotterdam. All of which are conducted within Van Lieshout’s signature style of provocation – be it political or material. Indeed, his works share a number of recurring themes, motives and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex and death. His prolific sculpture, Domestikator (2015), is an apt example, having caused controversy before being placed at the Louvre in Jardin des Tuilleries. It was later adopted by the Centre Pompidou, where it was shown during the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain in 2017.
Van Lieshout combines an imaginative aesthetic and ethic with a spirit of entrepreneurship; his work has sparked movements in the fields of architecture and ecology, and has been internationally celebrated, exhibited and published. Van Lieshout’s works have been included in the Gwangju, Venice, Yokohama, Christchurch, Shanghai and São Paulo Bienniales. Atelier Van Lieshout have won many awards since 1991, including the prix de Rome in 1995.
Considered one of the most influential artist-designers of the early 21st century, Maarten Baas straddles the boundaries between art and design. Known for his rebellious, intellectual, theatrical and artistic style, his oeuvre integrates conceptual art, craftsmanship, installation, public space and performance.
Born in 1978 in Arnsberg, Germany, Baas graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002, occupying a unique position in the field.
Drawing upon his graduate research on beauty and imperfection, Baas created his debut significant work Smoke, whereby he charcoals objects and preserves resin, experimenting with nature in constant flux. His Clay series expresses artistic vulnerability, with each piece being handmade. Baas’ most renowned work, Real Time series – 12-hour films of performances indicating the time – combine theatre, art, film and design. These works gave him instant worldwide recognition. His work is in numerous private and major museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK, Les Arts Décoratifs Paris, France, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Pinakothek der Moderne – Die Neue Sammlung, Munich, DE and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, AU.
In 2009, he was named ‘Designer of the Year’ at Design Basel/ Miami. In 2012, the New York Times listed both Smoke and Clay in its ‘Top 25 Design Classics of the Future’. In 2016, Baas won the Artprize for his Real Time: Sweepers Clock.
Baas has also worked for brands like Louis Vuitton, Swarovski, Hermès, Dior, Isabel Marant, KLM and Schiphol Airport, Dom Ruinart and Berluti.
In 2017, his first monograph was published, titled Hide & Seek, coinciding with a major museum solo show at the Groninger Museum, Netherlands, that still travels to museums worldwide.
“I like to see objects as living organisms, imagine them coming alive and being able to surprise you with their behaviour. I want to create objects with my hands; then I can give them my personality. I turn them into communicative objects that can arouse one’s feelings and imagination. In short, what I want to create are objects with a fictional or fantasy element that allow you to escape everyday life,” says Nacho Carbonell.
Carbonell is known for his tactile approach to sculpture which plays with textures, experimental techniques, and natural materials.
Born in Spain in 1980 and now based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Carbonell works alongside his team of designers and artists in an open warehouse. He graduated in 2003 from Cardenal Herrera University in Spain and went on to study at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Upon graduating, he created collections such as Evolution in 2009, which won him a nomination for Beazley Design of the Year from the Design Museum in London.
In 2010, a year after being named a Designer of the Future at Design Miami/ Basel, he presented This Identity, redefining his current style of organic forms and rough and colourful textures. His pieces are part of private collections and museums around the world.
Co-founded in 1984 by brothers Fernando (1961) and Humberto (1953) Campana, the studio Campana has achieved international recognition for its furniture design and intriguing pieces. In 2019, the studio celebrated its 35th anniversary acknowledged as a pioneer of disruptive Design, which led them to create a groundbreaking language in their field.
Deeply rooted in Brazilian culture and traditions, their work carries universal values at its core, such as freedom and human dignity, creating their identity through life experiences. By incorporating the idea of transformation and reinvention, their creative process raises everyday materials to nobility. Brazilian characteristics – such as the abundance of colours, mixtures, and creative chaos – bring the triumph of simple solutions, poetically.
Based in São Paulo, studio Campana is constantly investigating new possibilities within Design: from furniture making to architecture, landscaping, fashion, scenography, and more. Bridging disciplines and encouraging the exchange of expertise among communities and artists are vital sources of inspiration, fresh repertoire, and free-thinking. Working with multiple brands and industries allows them to combine the best of craftsmanship, sustainable production practices and state-of-the-art technologies.
Born in Kansas in 1932, Wendell Castle received two degrees from the University of Kansas, one in industrial design in 1958 and the other in sculpture in 1961. He moved to Rochester, New York to teach at the School for American Crafts and established a permanent studio in the area that is still in operation today. He reinvented himself for nearly six decades.
Often credited as the founding father of the American Art Furniture movement, Castle has redefined sculpture and design by seamlessly merging the two into one discipline. He created unique pieces that blur the distinction between design and sculpture. Castle’s organic and whimsical approach to sculpture incorporates his own invented technique of carving into stacked laminated wood known as lamination. His furniture designs for residential clients, public spaces, and a number of churches represent a unique exploration of the qualities and possibilities of wood and fiberglass.
His work can be found in the permanent collections of more than forty museums and cultural institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the White House in Washington, D.C. Moreover, he has been the recipient of many honours and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.
Vincenzo De Cotiis is an Italian artist who is considered a protagonist of contemporary collectible design. De Cotiis’ universe is one where art meets function, fuelled by parallelisms of space and time, cultural layerings and quantum leaps.
Vincenzo De Cotiis was born in 1958 in Gonzaga, Italy. He studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and founded his studio in Milan where he lives and works.
As an architect, De Cotiis creates sculptural spaces that evoke physical and intellectual experiences on the cusp of art and architecture, defying traditional categorisation between artistic disciplines. A fertile dialogue between the old and the new is a cornerstone of his work; history breaks free into spaces where the line between past and future blends.
De Cotiis seeks new manifestations that can conflate archaic idioms with futuristic expressions. His creations are born out of an assembly of recovered materials and reflective, futuristic surfaces, appearing evocative in their final form. His work is a form of art and design that is not replicable. It represents a winding path that often doubles back upon itself, manifested through the materiality of his countless works.
De Cotiis’ work was presented at the Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City, the Ca’ d’Oro on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, and the Powerlong Art Museum in Shanghai. His installation art, Ode, will join the permanent collection of the FENIX Museum of Migration in Rotterdam.
Selected pieces are available through Vincenzo De Cotiis Gallery in Milan, Carpenters Workshop Gallery, and at leading global art and design fairs including Design Miami, Dubai Design Week, PAD, TEFAF, The Armory Show and Zona Maco.
“My approach is about imbuing bronze with warmth and vitality by using scarification techniques and visual motifs inspired by the high art of cultures and communities with which I come into contact,” Ingrid Donat.
Ingrid Donat is a French artist born to a Swedish mother and a Reunionese father. This cultural blend has shaped the singularity of her art and creative aesthetic, characterised by craftsmanship and a unique fusion of traditional techniques and Art Deco aesthetics.
Raised in Sweden, Ingrid Donat returned to Paris to study at the École des Beaux Arts in 1975 where she met with Sylva Bernt who guided her in the field of sculpture. During the 80’s she became friends with the sculptor Diego Giacometti who encouraged her to create her own works. This kickstarted Ingrid Donat’s career in the art world and solidified her position as a pioneering figure for women finding freedoms through artistic expression at the time. Ingrid Donat has been an important figure in the design world for several decades and her collaboration with Carpenters Workshop Gallery spans over 15 years, cementing her status as a leading artist in her field.
Ingrid Donat integrates sculptural practices into the production of functional pieces. She builds a vocabulary that is enriched by bronze, wood, parchment and textiles with patterns inspired by scarification techniques. Ingrid Donat’s work is rooted in the tradition of French decorative arts and the influence of her own diverse cultural heritage and the world cultures she encounters, while her characters and intricate patterns are influenced by the work of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Armand-Albert Rateau. The harmonious integration of traditional techniques with contemporary sensibilities highlights the artist’s mastery of the soldering and engraving that adorn her pieces.
Ingrid Donat has showcased her work in numerous prestigious exhibitions and fairs globally. Notable exhibitions include Dark Fantasy at Carpenters Workshop Gallery x UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles (2019), Rituals at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in San Francisco (2019) and Dysfunctional at Galleria Giorgio Franchetti Alla Ca’ D’Oro in Venice (2019). She has also been featured in fairs such as Art021 in Shanghai (2019), TEFAF New York Spring (2019), Design Miami/Basel (2018) and PAD London (2018). Earlier, she participated in Origins at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York (2016) and Retrospective Exhibition 10 Years of Collectible Design in Mitry-Mory, France (2016), which is where her atelier is located and the year she began working with Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Her extensive career includes exhibitions at Design Miami/Miami (2010), Sotheby’s at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire (2010) and numerous appearances at the Pavilion of Art & Design in both London and Paris from 2008 to 2014.
Vincent Dubourg is a French artist born in 1977. Dubourg’s sculptural furniture makes contemporary allusions to traditional methods of cabinet making. This evokes a nostalgic sense of the familiar, which he simultaneously distorts with his fresh approach to materials and techniques.
Dubourg poetically fuses the crafts of glassblowing, wood-bending, and metal-casting to bring simple forms to life. In Napoleon A Trotinette, the solid form of a bureau is harmoniously combined with the graceful curves of bronze branches.
Dubourg’s designs introduce motion to stationary furniture. Vent Sur La Table whirls bronze and branches upwards as though freed from the constraints of gravity. Indeed, Dubourg offers a new perspective to furniture design, often subverting classic functional forms.
In Commode à Nouvelle Zélande, he flips a bar so that it rests on rows of up-turned glasses and bottles. Another piece in this series, Plancher à Nouvelle Zélande, sees shelves fly from the wall as if making an escape.
Dubourg’s conceptual twists add a surreal element to traditional craftsmanship, though he never relinquishes his devotion for the search of perfection.
Born in 1974, Mathieu Lehanneur is a French designer on the forefront of the international design scene. Mathieu Lehanneur has a multi-disciplinary approach to creativity: his projects stretch the realms of product design and object to architecture, craft, and technology.
His designs are inspired by nature yet push the limits of design by exploring new technologies. He crosses boarders by combining design, science, technology, and art in projects that aim to achieve maximum welfare for human beings. Air, water, light, and sound are amongst his favorite materials to create his science-inspired humanistic projects.
He considers human beings as complex structures who need more than chairs but need air to breathe, sustainable food, good health, and love to live better lives. Born in 1974, he graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris.
His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and at the Design Museum Gent. He has also designed interiors for Saint-Hilaire Church in Melle, France; for Château Borély in Marseille, France; for the Hôpital des Diaconesses in Paris, France; and for the Café ArtScience in Boston.
Video Credit: Financial Times and Lombard Odier.
“If you’re an architect, your world is a building, a graphic designer works on a newspaper or a wall, while a landscape architect plays with nature itself. I try and draw all these worlds together and see what happens when they meet,” Frederik Molenschot.
Frederik Molenschot, born in 1981, is an artist and designer from the Netherlands who describes himself as a landscape sculptor. Although not limited to one material, Molenschot is renowned for using bronze to create robust and large sculptures that navigate the natural, industrial, urban and cosmic realms.
Molenschot, a graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven who currently lives and works in Zaandam, is part of the Dutch Design Movement. His degree was earned with studies in man and public space, where he focused on connecting people and their environments.
Molenschot’s passion for making things started in his childhood; both of his parents’ families owned a factory and he also grew up next to one. He founded Studio Molen in 2005 and is a blur of constant energy, forever creating and developing new ideas and inspiring people. Working out of his studio, Molenschot crafts his pieces by hand and displays incredible diversity. He has a deep interest in the artificial and natural elements of our surroundings, and his aim is to transport the viewer’s senses to a new level.
Molenschot is best known for his cast bronze lighting structures, particularly his body of work City light, which he hand-shaped into detailed formations to channel and direct light. At his core, however, he is a passionate artist and polaroid photographer, often creating 3D works that translate his stories into objects. His artistic practice began in 2000, after creating Atlas, a diary of projects of and materials.
Frederik Molenschot has exhibited his work in several significant international exhibitions and fairs. In 2017, his pieces were featured in the Art Light exhibitions at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in both New York and London. His 2016 exhibitions included Zona Maco in Mexico City, Design Days Dubai, PAD Paris, ArtMonte-Carlo in Monaco, Art Light in Paris and Design Miami in the USA. In 2015, Molenschot showcased at Art Genève in Switzerland, Masterpiece in London and Guild in Cape Town. The previous year, his work appeared at BRAFA in Brussels, Design Shanghai, the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris and multiple shows in Dubai. Additionally, in 2013 and 2012, he participated in the Pavilion of Art & Design in Paris, Masterpiece London, Design Miami/Basel and Design Days Dubai. Earlier highlights include his participation in Design Miami/Miami in 2011 and the inaugural show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris the same year.
Rick Owens grew up in Porterville, a small town in California’s San Joaquin valley.
Drawn to pre-gentrified Hollywood and L.A.’s punk underground in the 80s, Owens studied painting at what is now Otis College of Art and Design. He then switched to Los Angeles Trade Technical-College to learn patternmaking and draping.
Owens launched his eponymous line in 1994, operating out of a raw storefront off Hollywood Boulevard. Photographer Corinne Day shot Kate Moss in his clothing for Carine Roitfeld’s Vogue Paris, which caught the attention of Anna Wintour. Consequently, American Vogue underwrote his first runway show, in New York, and the legendary French fur label Revillon hired him to modernise their centuries-old house. Owens also launched menswear in 2002, which he continues to show bi-annually at Paris men’s fashion week.
Owens moved to Paris with his wife and partner, Michèle Lamy, in 2003, setting up his home and atelier inside a historic five-storey building that previously served as offices for former French president François Mitterrand. His runway collections have been mounted in Paris since then.
Owens founded Owenscorp in France in 2004, making the label completely independently owned.
Diffusion collections that complement the original label for women and men include RICKOWENSLILIES and DRKSHDW. In addition to being carried in specialty boutiques worldwide, the first Rick Owens flagship opened in the Palais Royal of Paris in 2006 and additional stand-alone stores have followed globally. An e-commerce store was launched in 2013.
In July of 2005 he introduced a furniture collection. Using raw plywood, marble, and moose antlers, the collection is inspired by his favourite shapes from Eileen Gray to Brâncuși to California skateparks. The furniture collection has since been shown at the Musée d’art Moderne and Le Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
In 2002, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) honoured Owens with the Perry Ellis award for emerging talent. He was awarded the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Fashion Design in 2007, as well as The Rule Breakers Award from the Fashion Group International. In 2017, he received the CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award. Owens was named Menswear Designer of the Year at the CFDA fashion awards 2019, in addition to receiving the Fashion Group International Superstar Award later that same year. in 2021, Owens was awarded the WWD Honours Award for Womenswear Designer of the Year.
Owens has authored 6 books — L’ai-je bien descendu? (2007), Rick Owens (2011), Rick Owens: Furniture (2017), a limited edition box set titled Subhuman Inhuman Superhuman (2017), as well as Rick Owens photographed by Danielle Levitt and Legaspi by Rick Owens, both released in September 2019 by Rizzoli.
December 2017 saw the opening of a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Owens’ work at La Triennale di Milano.
In 2019, Owens designed the costumes and makeup for Hiroshi Sugimoto’s production of At the Hawks Well, presented at Opéra Garnier in Paris.
Random International is a postdigital art group exploring the impact of technological development on the human condition. Experimental by nature, Random International’s practice is fuelled by research and scientific discovery. The group aims to broaden the question of what it is to be alive today by experimenting with how we connect — to different kinds of life, to different views of the world, and to one another.
Artists Florian Ortkrass and Hannes Koch were both born in 1975 in Germany and met at Brunel University before going on to complete their Masters at the Royal College of Art. They founded Random International following their graduation from the RCA in 2005.
Nearing almost two decades since the studio’s inception, the focus of Random International’s artistic practice has continuously evolved, and today embraces sculpture, performance, and installation, often on an architectural scale. Their highly collectable work creates a bridge between the human, the digital and the architectural scales by creating monumental works that offer their audiences personal and instinctive experiences.
Their Swarm Study series explores the perceived embodiment of collective intelligence as expressed solely through movement, and the instinctual connections this can provoke in the human visual system. Inspired by the enigmatic and acrobatic efficiency of starlings’ murmurations in flight, the work simulates and disseminates natural flocking behaviour at its most basic algorithmic form, embodying it in light.
Their critically acclaimed installation Rain Room is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as the Sharjah Art Foundation and has also been exhibited at London’s Barbican (2012); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2015/2018); and MoCA Busan (2019). Editions of Rain Room have been permanently installed at the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE in 2018 and the Jackalope Collection in Melbourne, respectively (2019).
Their work is also found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum London, the Maxine & Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art Detroit, the YUZ Foundation Shanghai, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art LA.
DRIFT reconnects humanity with nature through technology. DRIFT manifests the phenomena and hidden properties of nature with the use of technology in order to learn from the Earth’s underlying mechanisms and to re-establish our connection to it.
Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta founded DRIFT in 2007 after graduating from the Design Academy in Eindhoven. With a multi-disciplinary team of 64, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances. They first collaborated on Gordijn’s graduation project, Fragile Future, which saw a number of ball-shaped LED lamps with real dandelion seeds glued onto them, giving the bulbs a flower-like appearance. With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s work illuminates the parallels between man-made and natural structures through deconstructive, interactive and innovative processes. The artists raise fundamental questions about what life is, and explore a positive scenario for the future. Fragile Future turned out to be the most successful project of DRIFT so far.
All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. However, the confined parametres of a museum or a gallery does not always do justice to a body of work. Rather, architecture or the public sphere can often help it to reach its potential. DRIFT brings people, space and nature on to the same frequency, inspiring audiences to reconnect to our planet.
DRIFT has realised numerous exhibitions and created projects from around the world. Their work has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London UK, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the UTA Artist Space, Atlanta, GA, the Garage Museum, Moscow, Russia and the Mint Museum, Charlotte, CA among others. Their work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the San Francisco Musem of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK.
They duo have won many awards around the world for their Fragile Future collection, including the 1st Prize Stichting ArtiParti in 2006 as well as the International Design Prize ‘Lights of the future’ for the German Design Council. In 2010, their Concrete Chandelier won a prize at the Moët-Hennessy Pavillion of Art and Design. Their work is also widely praised within the Netherlands, where they won the 1st Prize of the ZomerExpo at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and the Finest Light Sculpture Prize for Interieur, Kortrijk. Their work Flylight was rewarded with Best Piece of Arte Laguna, in Venice. More recently, in 2019 they were selected as Designer of the Year with the Dezeen Awards for their work Franchise Freedom.
Studio Job is a ground-breaking art and design studio based in the Netherlands and Milan. Led by Job Smeets (b.1969), a pioneer of contemporary conceptual and sculptural art and design, he founded Studio Job in 1998 in the renaissance spirit, combining traditional and modern techniques to produce once-in-a-lifetime objects. Smeets leads a team of highly talented craftspeople to produce art pieces, projects and products in their atelier in the Netherlands. The studio works across art, interiors and product design with a vast range of high profile clients, galleries, and brands.
In the Studio Job atelier, a vast range of crafts are practiced, where traditional craftspeople such as sculptors and specialists in casting bronze and making stained-glass windows and hand-painting work alongside experts adept in using lasers and 3D printing. In both the atelier and Job’s creative studio, technique, science, design and art come together in their work as examples of what can be described as Gesamtkunstwerk – a total art work or an all embracing art form.
Studio Job are pioneers of contemporary conceptual and sculptural design. The results range from bronze artwork in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, to the national stamp of the Netherlands featuring the Dutch King (forty million pieces produced), the unique life-size bronze sculptures on Miami Beach, to the one-off Wunderkammer curiosity cabinet produced for Swarovski in Innsbruck, Austria.
All Studio Job projects are distinguished by a love of detail, freedom of expression, and functional art. With more than 400 exhibitions and solo shows around the world, Studio Job’s work can be found in most important museum collections. Their iconic, heraldic and cartoon-like sculptures are prized by collectors world-wide. Proclaimed one of the most influential studios by the Financial Times, Studio Job are passionate about building up an oeuvre that is becoming increasingly extravagant in its details and increasingly personal.
Studio Job work across many areas including art, design, fashion, architecture and interiors having worked with a vast range of high profile clients including sculptures for Gufram, Barneys and Land Rover, set design for Viktor & Rolf and Mika, and product collections for many brands such as Swatch, Alessi, Moooi and Pepsi to name a few. In 2017 Studio Job teamed up with Italian manufacturer Seletti to form the joint brand BLOW producing products in their pop spirit with a radical twist. Inspired by the city, 2019 Job Smeets opened his new base in Porta Venezia, Milan joining the new wave of Italian post-modernists.
Job Smeets is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most influential players within design and art. His highly collectable work creates a bridge between object and product by merging functional art with ground-breaking concepts.
Charles Trevelyan was born in 1974 in Australia. With a background in material science and engineering, Charles navigated a gradual transition from the sciences to the arts before finding a natural home for his work at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in 2007. Along the way, Charles developed a style of work that references a diverse spectrum of influences including the natural textures and colour palettes that surrounded him during his upbringing in Australia, cellular and crystalline morphology that emerged in the electron microscopy projects from his earlier career to more recent interests such as the extraordinary range of intriguing patterns found in aerial photographs that result from unintentional interactions between industrial and agricultural land usage and natural landforms.
Eschewing traditional methods due to his unusual path into making, Charles embraces material and process exploration to develop furniture, lighting and design objects inspired by the varying ways in which people respond to the textures, colours and structures of the natural world. He’s interested in the manner in which small fluctuations shape our perception of form and the inferences we draw and seeks resonance points on continuums of variation where an object can transition from unbalanced or awkward to graceful through a process of incremental alterations in a given characteristic. With each creation, he seeks a balance between ambiguity and familiarity, interlinking form, colour, and texture to provoke curiosity in the observer.
Mostly favouring physical models and prototypes over sketching, Charles alternates between material experimentation and making with each aspect feeding back into the other in an incremental developmental process that is deliberately detached from any notion of a final destination or function. He creates test pieces, models and maquettes using an array of materials and processes in his studio, bringing together the physicality of the hand-worked sculpting, casting and texturing materials with the detail and precision of digital fabrication techniques. The new Gyre table lamp series encapsulates many of these elements of his practice, combining a careful study of sculptural form with an intensive process of experimentation to develop a unique self-coloured texture that mimics the variety found in natural textures.
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Born in Rockford, Illinois, Virgil Abloh was an artist, architect, engineer, creative director, artistic director, industrial designer, fashion designer, musician, DJ, and philanthropist. After earning a degree in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he completed a Master’s degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago. At IIT, while studying a design curriculum devised by Mies van der Rohe, Abloh began to craft the principles of his art practice. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago presented a major traveling survey of Abloh’s work in summer 2019—one of the highest attended exhibitions in the museum’s history. Abloh was the Chief Creative Director and founder of Off-White™ and Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton.
Atelier Van Lieshout rose to fame with projects that travel between the world of minimalist design and non-functional art, including sculptures and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.
Atelier Van Lieshout is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout. Van Lieshout graduated from the Rotterdam Art Academy and, in 1995, the artist founded his studio and has been working solely under the studio’s name ever since. The studio moniker exists in Van Lieshout’s practice as a methodology towards undermining the myth of the artistic genius.
Over the past three decades, Van Lieshout has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design and architecture. Van Lieshout dissects systems, be it society as a whole or the human body; he experiments, looks for alternatives, takes exhibitions as experiments for recycling and has even declared an independent state named AVL-Ville (2001), located in the port of Rotterdam. All of which are conducted within Van Lieshout’s signature style of provocation – be it political or material. Indeed, his works share a number of recurring themes, motives and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex and death. His prolific sculpture, Domestikator (2015), is an apt example, having caused controversy before being placed at the Louvre in Jardin des Tuilleries. It was later adopted by the Centre Pompidou, where it was shown during the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain in 2017.
Van Lieshout combines an imaginative aesthetic and ethic with a spirit of entrepreneurship; his work has sparked movements in the fields of architecture and ecology, and has been internationally celebrated, exhibited and published. Van Lieshout’s works have been included in the Gwangju, Venice, Yokohama, Christchurch, Shanghai and São Paulo Bienniales. Atelier Van Lieshout have won many awards since 1991, including the prix de Rome in 1995.
Considered one of the most influential artist-designers of the early 21st century, Maarten Baas straddles the boundaries between art and design. Known for his rebellious, intellectual, theatrical and artistic style, his oeuvre integrates conceptual art, craftsmanship, installation, public space and performance.
Born in 1978 in Arnsberg, Germany, Baas graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002, occupying a unique position in the field.
Drawing upon his graduate research on beauty and imperfection, Baas created his debut significant work Smoke, whereby he charcoals objects and preserves resin, experimenting with nature in constant flux. His Clay series expresses artistic vulnerability, with each piece being handmade. Baas’ most renowned work, Real Time series – 12-hour films of performances indicating the time – combine theatre, art, film and design. These works gave him instant worldwide recognition. His work is in numerous private and major museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK, Les Arts Décoratifs Paris, France, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Pinakothek der Moderne – Die Neue Sammlung, Munich, DE and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, AU.
In 2009, he was named ‘Designer of the Year’ at Design Basel/ Miami. In 2012, the New York Times listed both Smoke and Clay in its ‘Top 25 Design Classics of the Future’. In 2016, Baas won the Artprize for his Real Time: Sweepers Clock.
Baas has also worked for brands like Louis Vuitton, Swarovski, Hermès, Dior, Isabel Marant, KLM and Schiphol Airport, Dom Ruinart and Berluti.
In 2017, his first monograph was published, titled Hide & Seek, coinciding with a major museum solo show at the Groninger Museum, Netherlands, that still travels to museums worldwide.
“I like to see objects as living organisms, imagine them coming alive and being able to surprise you with their behaviour. I want to create objects with my hands; then I can give them my personality. I turn them into communicative objects that can arouse one’s feelings and imagination. In short, what I want to create are objects with a fictional or fantasy element that allow you to escape everyday life,” says Nacho Carbonell.
Carbonell is known for his tactile approach to sculpture which plays with textures, experimental techniques, and natural materials.
Born in Spain in 1980 and now based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Carbonell works alongside his team of designers and artists in an open warehouse. He graduated in 2003 from Cardenal Herrera University in Spain and went on to study at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Upon graduating, he created collections such as Evolution in 2009, which won him a nomination for Beazley Design of the Year from the Design Museum in London.
In 2010, a year after being named a Designer of the Future at Design Miami/ Basel, he presented This Identity, redefining his current style of organic forms and rough and colourful textures. His pieces are part of private collections and museums around the world.
Co-founded in 1984 by brothers Fernando (1961) and Humberto (1953) Campana, the studio Campana has achieved international recognition for its furniture design and intriguing pieces. In 2019, the studio celebrated its 35th anniversary acknowledged as a pioneer of disruptive Design, which led them to create a groundbreaking language in their field.
Deeply rooted in Brazilian culture and traditions, their work carries universal values at its core, such as freedom and human dignity, creating their identity through life experiences. By incorporating the idea of transformation and reinvention, their creative process raises everyday materials to nobility. Brazilian characteristics – such as the abundance of colours, mixtures, and creative chaos – bring the triumph of simple solutions, poetically.
Based in São Paulo, studio Campana is constantly investigating new possibilities within Design: from furniture making to architecture, landscaping, fashion, scenography, and more. Bridging disciplines and encouraging the exchange of expertise among communities and artists are vital sources of inspiration, fresh repertoire, and free-thinking. Working with multiple brands and industries allows them to combine the best of craftsmanship, sustainable production practices and state-of-the-art technologies.
Born in Kansas in 1932, Wendell Castle received two degrees from the University of Kansas, one in industrial design in 1958 and the other in sculpture in 1961. He moved to Rochester, New York to teach at the School for American Crafts and established a permanent studio in the area that is still in operation today. He reinvented himself for nearly six decades.
Often credited as the founding father of the American Art Furniture movement, Castle has redefined sculpture and design by seamlessly merging the two into one discipline. He created unique pieces that blur the distinction between design and sculpture. Castle’s organic and whimsical approach to sculpture incorporates his own invented technique of carving into stacked laminated wood known as lamination. His furniture designs for residential clients, public spaces, and a number of churches represent a unique exploration of the qualities and possibilities of wood and fiberglass.
His work can be found in the permanent collections of more than forty museums and cultural institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the White House in Washington, D.C. Moreover, he has been the recipient of many honours and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.
Vincenzo De Cotiis is an Italian artist who is considered a protagonist of contemporary collectible design. De Cotiis’ universe is one where art meets function, fuelled by parallelisms of space and time, cultural layerings and quantum leaps.
Vincenzo De Cotiis was born in 1958 in Gonzaga, Italy. He studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and founded his studio in Milan where he lives and works.
As an architect, De Cotiis creates sculptural spaces that evoke physical and intellectual experiences on the cusp of art and architecture, defying traditional categorisation between artistic disciplines. A fertile dialogue between the old and the new is a cornerstone of his work; history breaks free into spaces where the line between past and future blends.
De Cotiis seeks new manifestations that can conflate archaic idioms with futuristic expressions. His creations are born out of an assembly of recovered materials and reflective, futuristic surfaces, appearing evocative in their final form. His work is a form of art and design that is not replicable. It represents a winding path that often doubles back upon itself, manifested through the materiality of his countless works.
De Cotiis’ work was presented at the Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City, the Ca’ d’Oro on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, and the Powerlong Art Museum in Shanghai. His installation art, Ode, will join the permanent collection of the FENIX Museum of Migration in Rotterdam.
Selected pieces are available through Vincenzo De Cotiis Gallery in Milan, Carpenters Workshop Gallery, and at leading global art and design fairs including Design Miami, Dubai Design Week, PAD, TEFAF, The Armory Show and Zona Maco.
“My approach is about imbuing bronze with warmth and vitality by using scarification techniques and visual motifs inspired by the high art of cultures and communities with which I come into contact,” Ingrid Donat.
Ingrid Donat is a French artist born to a Swedish mother and a Reunionese father. This cultural blend has shaped the singularity of her art and creative aesthetic, characterised by craftsmanship and a unique fusion of traditional techniques and Art Deco aesthetics.
Raised in Sweden, Ingrid Donat returned to Paris to study at the École des Beaux Arts in 1975 where she met with Sylva Bernt who guided her in the field of sculpture. During the 80’s she became friends with the sculptor Diego Giacometti who encouraged her to create her own works. This kickstarted Ingrid Donat’s career in the art world and solidified her position as a pioneering figure for women finding freedoms through artistic expression at the time. Ingrid Donat has been an important figure in the design world for several decades and her collaboration with Carpenters Workshop Gallery spans over 15 years, cementing her status as a leading artist in her field.
Ingrid Donat integrates sculptural practices into the production of functional pieces. She builds a vocabulary that is enriched by bronze, wood, parchment and textiles with patterns inspired by scarification techniques. Ingrid Donat’s work is rooted in the tradition of French decorative arts and the influence of her own diverse cultural heritage and the world cultures she encounters, while her characters and intricate patterns are influenced by the work of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Armand-Albert Rateau. The harmonious integration of traditional techniques with contemporary sensibilities highlights the artist’s mastery of the soldering and engraving that adorn her pieces.
Ingrid Donat has showcased her work in numerous prestigious exhibitions and fairs globally. Notable exhibitions include Dark Fantasy at Carpenters Workshop Gallery x UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles (2019), Rituals at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in San Francisco (2019) and Dysfunctional at Galleria Giorgio Franchetti Alla Ca’ D’Oro in Venice (2019). She has also been featured in fairs such as Art021 in Shanghai (2019), TEFAF New York Spring (2019), Design Miami/Basel (2018) and PAD London (2018). Earlier, she participated in Origins at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York (2016) and Retrospective Exhibition 10 Years of Collectible Design in Mitry-Mory, France (2016), which is where her atelier is located and the year she began working with Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Her extensive career includes exhibitions at Design Miami/Miami (2010), Sotheby’s at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire (2010) and numerous appearances at the Pavilion of Art & Design in both London and Paris from 2008 to 2014.
Vincent Dubourg is a French artist born in 1977. Dubourg’s sculptural furniture makes contemporary allusions to traditional methods of cabinet making. This evokes a nostalgic sense of the familiar, which he simultaneously distorts with his fresh approach to materials and techniques.
Dubourg poetically fuses the crafts of glassblowing, wood-bending, and metal-casting to bring simple forms to life. In Napoleon A Trotinette, the solid form of a bureau is harmoniously combined with the graceful curves of bronze branches.
Dubourg’s designs introduce motion to stationary furniture. Vent Sur La Table whirls bronze and branches upwards as though freed from the constraints of gravity. Indeed, Dubourg offers a new perspective to furniture design, often subverting classic functional forms.
In Commode à Nouvelle Zélande, he flips a bar so that it rests on rows of up-turned glasses and bottles. Another piece in this series, Plancher à Nouvelle Zélande, sees shelves fly from the wall as if making an escape.
Dubourg’s conceptual twists add a surreal element to traditional craftsmanship, though he never relinquishes his devotion for the search of perfection.
Born in 1974, Mathieu Lehanneur is a French designer on the forefront of the international design scene. Mathieu Lehanneur has a multi-disciplinary approach to creativity: his projects stretch the realms of product design and object to architecture, craft, and technology.
His designs are inspired by nature yet push the limits of design by exploring new technologies. He crosses boarders by combining design, science, technology, and art in projects that aim to achieve maximum welfare for human beings. Air, water, light, and sound are amongst his favorite materials to create his science-inspired humanistic projects.
He considers human beings as complex structures who need more than chairs but need air to breathe, sustainable food, good health, and love to live better lives. Born in 1974, he graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris.
His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and at the Design Museum Gent. He has also designed interiors for Saint-Hilaire Church in Melle, France; for Château Borély in Marseille, France; for the Hôpital des Diaconesses in Paris, France; and for the Café ArtScience in Boston.
Video Credit: Financial Times and Lombard Odier.
“If you’re an architect, your world is a building, a graphic designer works on a newspaper or a wall, while a landscape architect plays with nature itself. I try and draw all these worlds together and see what happens when they meet,” Frederik Molenschot.
Frederik Molenschot, born in 1981, is an artist and designer from the Netherlands who describes himself as a landscape sculptor. Although not limited to one material, Molenschot is renowned for using bronze to create robust and large sculptures that navigate the natural, industrial, urban and cosmic realms.
Molenschot, a graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven who currently lives and works in Zaandam, is part of the Dutch Design Movement. His degree was earned with studies in man and public space, where he focused on connecting people and their environments.
Molenschot’s passion for making things started in his childhood; both of his parents’ families owned a factory and he also grew up next to one. He founded Studio Molen in 2005 and is a blur of constant energy, forever creating and developing new ideas and inspiring people. Working out of his studio, Molenschot crafts his pieces by hand and displays incredible diversity. He has a deep interest in the artificial and natural elements of our surroundings, and his aim is to transport the viewer’s senses to a new level.
Molenschot is best known for his cast bronze lighting structures, particularly his body of work City light, which he hand-shaped into detailed formations to channel and direct light. At his core, however, he is a passionate artist and polaroid photographer, often creating 3D works that translate his stories into objects. His artistic practice began in 2000, after creating Atlas, a diary of projects of and materials.
Frederik Molenschot has exhibited his work in several significant international exhibitions and fairs. In 2017, his pieces were featured in the Art Light exhibitions at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in both New York and London. His 2016 exhibitions included Zona Maco in Mexico City, Design Days Dubai, PAD Paris, ArtMonte-Carlo in Monaco, Art Light in Paris and Design Miami in the USA. In 2015, Molenschot showcased at Art Genève in Switzerland, Masterpiece in London and Guild in Cape Town. The previous year, his work appeared at BRAFA in Brussels, Design Shanghai, the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris and multiple shows in Dubai. Additionally, in 2013 and 2012, he participated in the Pavilion of Art & Design in Paris, Masterpiece London, Design Miami/Basel and Design Days Dubai. Earlier highlights include his participation in Design Miami/Miami in 2011 and the inaugural show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris the same year.
Rick Owens grew up in Porterville, a small town in California’s San Joaquin valley.
Drawn to pre-gentrified Hollywood and L.A.’s punk underground in the 80s, Owens studied painting at what is now Otis College of Art and Design. He then switched to Los Angeles Trade Technical-College to learn patternmaking and draping.
Owens launched his eponymous line in 1994, operating out of a raw storefront off Hollywood Boulevard. Photographer Corinne Day shot Kate Moss in his clothing for Carine Roitfeld’s Vogue Paris, which caught the attention of Anna Wintour. Consequently, American Vogue underwrote his first runway show, in New York, and the legendary French fur label Revillon hired him to modernise their centuries-old house. Owens also launched menswear in 2002, which he continues to show bi-annually at Paris men’s fashion week.
Owens moved to Paris with his wife and partner, Michèle Lamy, in 2003, setting up his home and atelier inside a historic five-storey building that previously served as offices for former French president François Mitterrand. His runway collections have been mounted in Paris since then.
Owens founded Owenscorp in France in 2004, making the label completely independently owned.
Diffusion collections that complement the original label for women and men include RICKOWENSLILIES and DRKSHDW. In addition to being carried in specialty boutiques worldwide, the first Rick Owens flagship opened in the Palais Royal of Paris in 2006 and additional stand-alone stores have followed globally. An e-commerce store was launched in 2013.
In July of 2005 he introduced a furniture collection. Using raw plywood, marble, and moose antlers, the collection is inspired by his favourite shapes from Eileen Gray to Brâncuși to California skateparks. The furniture collection has since been shown at the Musée d’art Moderne and Le Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
In 2002, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) honoured Owens with the Perry Ellis award for emerging talent. He was awarded the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Fashion Design in 2007, as well as The Rule Breakers Award from the Fashion Group International. In 2017, he received the CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award. Owens was named Menswear Designer of the Year at the CFDA fashion awards 2019, in addition to receiving the Fashion Group International Superstar Award later that same year. in 2021, Owens was awarded the WWD Honours Award for Womenswear Designer of the Year.
Owens has authored 6 books — L’ai-je bien descendu? (2007), Rick Owens (2011), Rick Owens: Furniture (2017), a limited edition box set titled Subhuman Inhuman Superhuman (2017), as well as Rick Owens photographed by Danielle Levitt and Legaspi by Rick Owens, both released in September 2019 by Rizzoli.
December 2017 saw the opening of a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Owens’ work at La Triennale di Milano.
In 2019, Owens designed the costumes and makeup for Hiroshi Sugimoto’s production of At the Hawks Well, presented at Opéra Garnier in Paris.
Random International is a postdigital art group exploring the impact of technological development on the human condition. Experimental by nature, Random International’s practice is fuelled by research and scientific discovery. The group aims to broaden the question of what it is to be alive today by experimenting with how we connect — to different kinds of life, to different views of the world, and to one another.
Artists Florian Ortkrass and Hannes Koch were both born in 1975 in Germany and met at Brunel University before going on to complete their Masters at the Royal College of Art. They founded Random International following their graduation from the RCA in 2005.
Nearing almost two decades since the studio’s inception, the focus of Random International’s artistic practice has continuously evolved, and today embraces sculpture, performance, and installation, often on an architectural scale. Their highly collectable work creates a bridge between the human, the digital and the architectural scales by creating monumental works that offer their audiences personal and instinctive experiences.
Their Swarm Study series explores the perceived embodiment of collective intelligence as expressed solely through movement, and the instinctual connections this can provoke in the human visual system. Inspired by the enigmatic and acrobatic efficiency of starlings’ murmurations in flight, the work simulates and disseminates natural flocking behaviour at its most basic algorithmic form, embodying it in light.
Their critically acclaimed installation Rain Room is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as the Sharjah Art Foundation and has also been exhibited at London’s Barbican (2012); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2015/2018); and MoCA Busan (2019). Editions of Rain Room have been permanently installed at the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE in 2018 and the Jackalope Collection in Melbourne, respectively (2019).
Their work is also found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum London, the Maxine & Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art Detroit, the YUZ Foundation Shanghai, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art LA.
DRIFT reconnects humanity with nature through technology. DRIFT manifests the phenomena and hidden properties of nature with the use of technology in order to learn from the Earth’s underlying mechanisms and to re-establish our connection to it.
Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta founded DRIFT in 2007 after graduating from the Design Academy in Eindhoven. With a multi-disciplinary team of 64, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances. They first collaborated on Gordijn’s graduation project, Fragile Future, which saw a number of ball-shaped LED lamps with real dandelion seeds glued onto them, giving the bulbs a flower-like appearance. With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s work illuminates the parallels between man-made and natural structures through deconstructive, interactive and innovative processes. The artists raise fundamental questions about what life is, and explore a positive scenario for the future. Fragile Future turned out to be the most successful project of DRIFT so far.
All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. However, the confined parametres of a museum or a gallery does not always do justice to a body of work. Rather, architecture or the public sphere can often help it to reach its potential. DRIFT brings people, space and nature on to the same frequency, inspiring audiences to reconnect to our planet.
DRIFT has realised numerous exhibitions and created projects from around the world. Their work has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London UK, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the UTA Artist Space, Atlanta, GA, the Garage Museum, Moscow, Russia and the Mint Museum, Charlotte, CA among others. Their work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the San Francisco Musem of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK.
They duo have won many awards around the world for their Fragile Future collection, including the 1st Prize Stichting ArtiParti in 2006 as well as the International Design Prize ‘Lights of the future’ for the German Design Council. In 2010, their Concrete Chandelier won a prize at the Moët-Hennessy Pavillion of Art and Design. Their work is also widely praised within the Netherlands, where they won the 1st Prize of the ZomerExpo at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and the Finest Light Sculpture Prize for Interieur, Kortrijk. Their work Flylight was rewarded with Best Piece of Arte Laguna, in Venice. More recently, in 2019 they were selected as Designer of the Year with the Dezeen Awards for their work Franchise Freedom.
Studio Job is a ground-breaking art and design studio based in the Netherlands and Milan. Led by Job Smeets (b.1969), a pioneer of contemporary conceptual and sculptural art and design, he founded Studio Job in 1998 in the renaissance spirit, combining traditional and modern techniques to produce once-in-a-lifetime objects. Smeets leads a team of highly talented craftspeople to produce art pieces, projects and products in their atelier in the Netherlands. The studio works across art, interiors and product design with a vast range of high profile clients, galleries, and brands.
In the Studio Job atelier, a vast range of crafts are practiced, where traditional craftspeople such as sculptors and specialists in casting bronze and making stained-glass windows and hand-painting work alongside experts adept in using lasers and 3D printing. In both the atelier and Job’s creative studio, technique, science, design and art come together in their work as examples of what can be described as Gesamtkunstwerk – a total art work or an all embracing art form.
Studio Job are pioneers of contemporary conceptual and sculptural design. The results range from bronze artwork in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, to the national stamp of the Netherlands featuring the Dutch King (forty million pieces produced), the unique life-size bronze sculptures on Miami Beach, to the one-off Wunderkammer curiosity cabinet produced for Swarovski in Innsbruck, Austria.
All Studio Job projects are distinguished by a love of detail, freedom of expression, and functional art. With more than 400 exhibitions and solo shows around the world, Studio Job’s work can be found in most important museum collections. Their iconic, heraldic and cartoon-like sculptures are prized by collectors world-wide. Proclaimed one of the most influential studios by the Financial Times, Studio Job are passionate about building up an oeuvre that is becoming increasingly extravagant in its details and increasingly personal.
Studio Job work across many areas including art, design, fashion, architecture and interiors having worked with a vast range of high profile clients including sculptures for Gufram, Barneys and Land Rover, set design for Viktor & Rolf and Mika, and product collections for many brands such as Swatch, Alessi, Moooi and Pepsi to name a few. In 2017 Studio Job teamed up with Italian manufacturer Seletti to form the joint brand BLOW producing products in their pop spirit with a radical twist. Inspired by the city, 2019 Job Smeets opened his new base in Porta Venezia, Milan joining the new wave of Italian post-modernists.
Job Smeets is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most influential players within design and art. His highly collectable work creates a bridge between object and product by merging functional art with ground-breaking concepts.
Charles Trevelyan was born in 1974 in Australia. With a background in material science and engineering, Charles navigated a gradual transition from the sciences to the arts before finding a natural home for his work at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in 2007. Along the way, Charles developed a style of work that references a diverse spectrum of influences including the natural textures and colour palettes that surrounded him during his upbringing in Australia, cellular and crystalline morphology that emerged in the electron microscopy projects from his earlier career to more recent interests such as the extraordinary range of intriguing patterns found in aerial photographs that result from unintentional interactions between industrial and agricultural land usage and natural landforms.
Eschewing traditional methods due to his unusual path into making, Charles embraces material and process exploration to develop furniture, lighting and design objects inspired by the varying ways in which people respond to the textures, colours and structures of the natural world. He’s interested in the manner in which small fluctuations shape our perception of form and the inferences we draw and seeks resonance points on continuums of variation where an object can transition from unbalanced or awkward to graceful through a process of incremental alterations in a given characteristic. With each creation, he seeks a balance between ambiguity and familiarity, interlinking form, colour, and texture to provoke curiosity in the observer.
Mostly favouring physical models and prototypes over sketching, Charles alternates between material experimentation and making with each aspect feeding back into the other in an incremental developmental process that is deliberately detached from any notion of a final destination or function. He creates test pieces, models and maquettes using an array of materials and processes in his studio, bringing together the physicality of the hand-worked sculpting, casting and texturing materials with the detail and precision of digital fabrication techniques. The new Gyre table lamp series encapsulates many of these elements of his practice, combining a careful study of sculptural form with an intensive process of experimentation to develop a unique self-coloured texture that mimics the variety found in natural textures.
Born in Rockford, Illinois, Virgil Abloh was an artist, architect, engineer, creative director, artistic director, industrial designer, fashion designer, musician, DJ, and philanthropist. After earning a degree in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he completed a Master’s degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago. At IIT, while studying a design curriculum devised by Mies van der Rohe, Abloh began to craft the principles of his art practice. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago presented a major traveling survey of Abloh’s work in summer 2019—one of the highest attended exhibitions in the museum’s history. Abloh was the Chief Creative Director and founder of Off-White™ and Men’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton.
Atelier Van Lieshout rose to fame with projects that travel between the world of minimalist design and non-functional art, including sculptures and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.
Atelier Van Lieshout is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout. Van Lieshout graduated from the Rotterdam Art Academy and, in 1995, the artist founded his studio and has been working solely under the studio’s name ever since. The studio moniker exists in Van Lieshout’s practice as a methodology towards undermining the myth of the artistic genius.
Over the past three decades, Van Lieshout has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design and architecture. Van Lieshout dissects systems, be it society as a whole or the human body; he experiments, looks for alternatives, takes exhibitions as experiments for recycling and has even declared an independent state named AVL-Ville (2001), located in the port of Rotterdam. All of which are conducted within Van Lieshout’s signature style of provocation – be it political or material. Indeed, his works share a number of recurring themes, motives and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex and death. His prolific sculpture, Domestikator (2015), is an apt example, having caused controversy before being placed at the Louvre in Jardin des Tuilleries. It was later adopted by the Centre Pompidou, where it was shown during the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain in 2017.
Van Lieshout combines an imaginative aesthetic and ethic with a spirit of entrepreneurship; his work has sparked movements in the fields of architecture and ecology, and has been internationally celebrated, exhibited and published. Van Lieshout’s works have been included in the Gwangju, Venice, Yokohama, Christchurch, Shanghai and São Paulo Bienniales. Atelier Van Lieshout have won many awards since 1991, including the prix de Rome in 1995.
Considered one of the most influential artist-designers of the early 21st century, Maarten Baas straddles the boundaries between art and design. Known for his rebellious, intellectual, theatrical and artistic style, his oeuvre integrates conceptual art, craftsmanship, installation, public space and performance.
Born in 1978 in Arnsberg, Germany, Baas graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002, occupying a unique position in the field.
Drawing upon his graduate research on beauty and imperfection, Baas created his debut significant work Smoke, whereby he charcoals objects and preserves resin, experimenting with nature in constant flux. His Clay series expresses artistic vulnerability, with each piece being handmade. Baas’ most renowned work, Real Time series – 12-hour films of performances indicating the time – combine theatre, art, film and design. These works gave him instant worldwide recognition. His work is in numerous private and major museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK, Les Arts Décoratifs Paris, France, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Pinakothek der Moderne – Die Neue Sammlung, Munich, DE and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, AU.
In 2009, he was named ‘Designer of the Year’ at Design Basel/ Miami. In 2012, the New York Times listed both Smoke and Clay in its ‘Top 25 Design Classics of the Future’. In 2016, Baas won the Artprize for his Real Time: Sweepers Clock.
Baas has also worked for brands like Louis Vuitton, Swarovski, Hermès, Dior, Isabel Marant, KLM and Schiphol Airport, Dom Ruinart and Berluti.
In 2017, his first monograph was published, titled Hide & Seek, coinciding with a major museum solo show at the Groninger Museum, Netherlands, that still travels to museums worldwide.
“I like to see objects as living organisms, imagine them coming alive and being able to surprise you with their behaviour. I want to create objects with my hands; then I can give them my personality. I turn them into communicative objects that can arouse one’s feelings and imagination. In short, what I want to create are objects with a fictional or fantasy element that allow you to escape everyday life,” says Nacho Carbonell.
Carbonell is known for his tactile approach to sculpture which plays with textures, experimental techniques, and natural materials.
Born in Spain in 1980 and now based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Carbonell works alongside his team of designers and artists in an open warehouse. He graduated in 2003 from Cardenal Herrera University in Spain and went on to study at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Upon graduating, he created collections such as Evolution in 2009, which won him a nomination for Beazley Design of the Year from the Design Museum in London.
In 2010, a year after being named a Designer of the Future at Design Miami/ Basel, he presented This Identity, redefining his current style of organic forms and rough and colourful textures. His pieces are part of private collections and museums around the world.
Co-founded in 1984 by brothers Fernando (1961) and Humberto (1953) Campana, the studio Campana has achieved international recognition for its furniture design and intriguing pieces. In 2019, the studio celebrated its 35th anniversary acknowledged as a pioneer of disruptive Design, which led them to create a groundbreaking language in their field.
Deeply rooted in Brazilian culture and traditions, their work carries universal values at its core, such as freedom and human dignity, creating their identity through life experiences. By incorporating the idea of transformation and reinvention, their creative process raises everyday materials to nobility. Brazilian characteristics – such as the abundance of colours, mixtures, and creative chaos – bring the triumph of simple solutions, poetically.
Based in São Paulo, studio Campana is constantly investigating new possibilities within Design: from furniture making to architecture, landscaping, fashion, scenography, and more. Bridging disciplines and encouraging the exchange of expertise among communities and artists are vital sources of inspiration, fresh repertoire, and free-thinking. Working with multiple brands and industries allows them to combine the best of craftsmanship, sustainable production practices and state-of-the-art technologies.
Born in Kansas in 1932, Wendell Castle received two degrees from the University of Kansas, one in industrial design in 1958 and the other in sculpture in 1961. He moved to Rochester, New York to teach at the School for American Crafts and established a permanent studio in the area that is still in operation today. He reinvented himself for nearly six decades.
Often credited as the founding father of the American Art Furniture movement, Castle has redefined sculpture and design by seamlessly merging the two into one discipline. He created unique pieces that blur the distinction between design and sculpture. Castle’s organic and whimsical approach to sculpture incorporates his own invented technique of carving into stacked laminated wood known as lamination. His furniture designs for residential clients, public spaces, and a number of churches represent a unique exploration of the qualities and possibilities of wood and fiberglass.
His work can be found in the permanent collections of more than forty museums and cultural institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the White House in Washington, D.C. Moreover, he has been the recipient of many honours and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.
Vincenzo De Cotiis is an Italian artist who is considered a protagonist of contemporary collectible design. De Cotiis’ universe is one where art meets function, fuelled by parallelisms of space and time, cultural layerings and quantum leaps.
Vincenzo De Cotiis was born in 1958 in Gonzaga, Italy. He studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and founded his studio in Milan where he lives and works.
As an architect, De Cotiis creates sculptural spaces that evoke physical and intellectual experiences on the cusp of art and architecture, defying traditional categorisation between artistic disciplines. A fertile dialogue between the old and the new is a cornerstone of his work; history breaks free into spaces where the line between past and future blends.
De Cotiis seeks new manifestations that can conflate archaic idioms with futuristic expressions. His creations are born out of an assembly of recovered materials and reflective, futuristic surfaces, appearing evocative in their final form. His work is a form of art and design that is not replicable. It represents a winding path that often doubles back upon itself, manifested through the materiality of his countless works.
De Cotiis’ work was presented at the Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City, the Ca’ d’Oro on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, and the Powerlong Art Museum in Shanghai. His installation art, Ode, will join the permanent collection of the FENIX Museum of Migration in Rotterdam.
Selected pieces are available through Vincenzo De Cotiis Gallery in Milan, Carpenters Workshop Gallery, and at leading global art and design fairs including Design Miami, Dubai Design Week, PAD, TEFAF, The Armory Show and Zona Maco.
“My approach is about imbuing bronze with warmth and vitality by using scarification techniques and visual motifs inspired by the high art of cultures and communities with which I come into contact,” Ingrid Donat.
Ingrid Donat is a French artist born to a Swedish mother and a Reunionese father. This cultural blend has shaped the singularity of her art and creative aesthetic, characterised by craftsmanship and a unique fusion of traditional techniques and Art Deco aesthetics.
Raised in Sweden, Ingrid Donat returned to Paris to study at the École des Beaux Arts in 1975 where she met with Sylva Bernt who guided her in the field of sculpture. During the 80’s she became friends with the sculptor Diego Giacometti who encouraged her to create her own works. This kickstarted Ingrid Donat’s career in the art world and solidified her position as a pioneering figure for women finding freedoms through artistic expression at the time. Ingrid Donat has been an important figure in the design world for several decades and her collaboration with Carpenters Workshop Gallery spans over 15 years, cementing her status as a leading artist in her field.
Ingrid Donat integrates sculptural practices into the production of functional pieces. She builds a vocabulary that is enriched by bronze, wood, parchment and textiles with patterns inspired by scarification techniques. Ingrid Donat’s work is rooted in the tradition of French decorative arts and the influence of her own diverse cultural heritage and the world cultures she encounters, while her characters and intricate patterns are influenced by the work of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Armand-Albert Rateau. The harmonious integration of traditional techniques with contemporary sensibilities highlights the artist’s mastery of the soldering and engraving that adorn her pieces.
Ingrid Donat has showcased her work in numerous prestigious exhibitions and fairs globally. Notable exhibitions include Dark Fantasy at Carpenters Workshop Gallery x UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles (2019), Rituals at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in San Francisco (2019) and Dysfunctional at Galleria Giorgio Franchetti Alla Ca’ D’Oro in Venice (2019). She has also been featured in fairs such as Art021 in Shanghai (2019), TEFAF New York Spring (2019), Design Miami/Basel (2018) and PAD London (2018). Earlier, she participated in Origins at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York (2016) and Retrospective Exhibition 10 Years of Collectible Design in Mitry-Mory, France (2016), which is where her atelier is located and the year she began working with Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Her extensive career includes exhibitions at Design Miami/Miami (2010), Sotheby’s at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire (2010) and numerous appearances at the Pavilion of Art & Design in both London and Paris from 2008 to 2014.
Vincent Dubourg is a French artist born in 1977. Dubourg’s sculptural furniture makes contemporary allusions to traditional methods of cabinet making. This evokes a nostalgic sense of the familiar, which he simultaneously distorts with his fresh approach to materials and techniques.
Dubourg poetically fuses the crafts of glassblowing, wood-bending, and metal-casting to bring simple forms to life. In Napoleon A Trotinette, the solid form of a bureau is harmoniously combined with the graceful curves of bronze branches.
Dubourg’s designs introduce motion to stationary furniture. Vent Sur La Table whirls bronze and branches upwards as though freed from the constraints of gravity. Indeed, Dubourg offers a new perspective to furniture design, often subverting classic functional forms.
In Commode à Nouvelle Zélande, he flips a bar so that it rests on rows of up-turned glasses and bottles. Another piece in this series, Plancher à Nouvelle Zélande, sees shelves fly from the wall as if making an escape.
Dubourg’s conceptual twists add a surreal element to traditional craftsmanship, though he never relinquishes his devotion for the search of perfection.
Born in 1974, Mathieu Lehanneur is a French designer on the forefront of the international design scene. Mathieu Lehanneur has a multi-disciplinary approach to creativity: his projects stretch the realms of product design and object to architecture, craft, and technology.
His designs are inspired by nature yet push the limits of design by exploring new technologies. He crosses boarders by combining design, science, technology, and art in projects that aim to achieve maximum welfare for human beings. Air, water, light, and sound are amongst his favorite materials to create his science-inspired humanistic projects.
He considers human beings as complex structures who need more than chairs but need air to breathe, sustainable food, good health, and love to live better lives. Born in 1974, he graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris.
His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and at the Design Museum Gent. He has also designed interiors for Saint-Hilaire Church in Melle, France; for Château Borély in Marseille, France; for the Hôpital des Diaconesses in Paris, France; and for the Café ArtScience in Boston.
Video Credit: Financial Times and Lombard Odier.
“If you’re an architect, your world is a building, a graphic designer works on a newspaper or a wall, while a landscape architect plays with nature itself. I try and draw all these worlds together and see what happens when they meet,” Frederik Molenschot.
Frederik Molenschot, born in 1981, is an artist and designer from the Netherlands who describes himself as a landscape sculptor. Although not limited to one material, Molenschot is renowned for using bronze to create robust and large sculptures that navigate the natural, industrial, urban and cosmic realms.
Molenschot, a graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven who currently lives and works in Zaandam, is part of the Dutch Design Movement. His degree was earned with studies in man and public space, where he focused on connecting people and their environments.
Molenschot’s passion for making things started in his childhood; both of his parents’ families owned a factory and he also grew up next to one. He founded Studio Molen in 2005 and is a blur of constant energy, forever creating and developing new ideas and inspiring people. Working out of his studio, Molenschot crafts his pieces by hand and displays incredible diversity. He has a deep interest in the artificial and natural elements of our surroundings, and his aim is to transport the viewer’s senses to a new level.
Molenschot is best known for his cast bronze lighting structures, particularly his body of work City light, which he hand-shaped into detailed formations to channel and direct light. At his core, however, he is a passionate artist and polaroid photographer, often creating 3D works that translate his stories into objects. His artistic practice began in 2000, after creating Atlas, a diary of projects of and materials.
Frederik Molenschot has exhibited his work in several significant international exhibitions and fairs. In 2017, his pieces were featured in the Art Light exhibitions at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in both New York and London. His 2016 exhibitions included Zona Maco in Mexico City, Design Days Dubai, PAD Paris, ArtMonte-Carlo in Monaco, Art Light in Paris and Design Miami in the USA. In 2015, Molenschot showcased at Art Genève in Switzerland, Masterpiece in London and Guild in Cape Town. The previous year, his work appeared at BRAFA in Brussels, Design Shanghai, the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris and multiple shows in Dubai. Additionally, in 2013 and 2012, he participated in the Pavilion of Art & Design in Paris, Masterpiece London, Design Miami/Basel and Design Days Dubai. Earlier highlights include his participation in Design Miami/Miami in 2011 and the inaugural show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris the same year.
Rick Owens grew up in Porterville, a small town in California’s San Joaquin valley.
Drawn to pre-gentrified Hollywood and L.A.’s punk underground in the 80s, Owens studied painting at what is now Otis College of Art and Design. He then switched to Los Angeles Trade Technical-College to learn patternmaking and draping.
Owens launched his eponymous line in 1994, operating out of a raw storefront off Hollywood Boulevard. Photographer Corinne Day shot Kate Moss in his clothing for Carine Roitfeld’s Vogue Paris, which caught the attention of Anna Wintour. Consequently, American Vogue underwrote his first runway show, in New York, and the legendary French fur label Revillon hired him to modernise their centuries-old house. Owens also launched menswear in 2002, which he continues to show bi-annually at Paris men’s fashion week.
Owens moved to Paris with his wife and partner, Michèle Lamy, in 2003, setting up his home and atelier inside a historic five-storey building that previously served as offices for former French president François Mitterrand. His runway collections have been mounted in Paris since then.
Owens founded Owenscorp in France in 2004, making the label completely independently owned.
Diffusion collections that complement the original label for women and men include RICKOWENSLILIES and DRKSHDW. In addition to being carried in specialty boutiques worldwide, the first Rick Owens flagship opened in the Palais Royal of Paris in 2006 and additional stand-alone stores have followed globally. An e-commerce store was launched in 2013.
In July of 2005 he introduced a furniture collection. Using raw plywood, marble, and moose antlers, the collection is inspired by his favourite shapes from Eileen Gray to Brâncuși to California skateparks. The furniture collection has since been shown at the Musée d’art Moderne and Le Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
In 2002, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) honoured Owens with the Perry Ellis award for emerging talent. He was awarded the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Fashion Design in 2007, as well as The Rule Breakers Award from the Fashion Group International. In 2017, he received the CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award. Owens was named Menswear Designer of the Year at the CFDA fashion awards 2019, in addition to receiving the Fashion Group International Superstar Award later that same year. in 2021, Owens was awarded the WWD Honours Award for Womenswear Designer of the Year.
Owens has authored 6 books — L’ai-je bien descendu? (2007), Rick Owens (2011), Rick Owens: Furniture (2017), a limited edition box set titled Subhuman Inhuman Superhuman (2017), as well as Rick Owens photographed by Danielle Levitt and Legaspi by Rick Owens, both released in September 2019 by Rizzoli.
December 2017 saw the opening of a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Owens’ work at La Triennale di Milano.
In 2019, Owens designed the costumes and makeup for Hiroshi Sugimoto’s production of At the Hawks Well, presented at Opéra Garnier in Paris.
Random International is a postdigital art group exploring the impact of technological development on the human condition. Experimental by nature, Random International’s practice is fuelled by research and scientific discovery. The group aims to broaden the question of what it is to be alive today by experimenting with how we connect — to different kinds of life, to different views of the world, and to one another.
Artists Florian Ortkrass and Hannes Koch were both born in 1975 in Germany and met at Brunel University before going on to complete their Masters at the Royal College of Art. They founded Random International following their graduation from the RCA in 2005.
Nearing almost two decades since the studio’s inception, the focus of Random International’s artistic practice has continuously evolved, and today embraces sculpture, performance, and installation, often on an architectural scale. Their highly collectable work creates a bridge between the human, the digital and the architectural scales by creating monumental works that offer their audiences personal and instinctive experiences.
Their Swarm Study series explores the perceived embodiment of collective intelligence as expressed solely through movement, and the instinctual connections this can provoke in the human visual system. Inspired by the enigmatic and acrobatic efficiency of starlings’ murmurations in flight, the work simulates and disseminates natural flocking behaviour at its most basic algorithmic form, embodying it in light.
Their critically acclaimed installation Rain Room is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as the Sharjah Art Foundation and has also been exhibited at London’s Barbican (2012); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2015/2018); and MoCA Busan (2019). Editions of Rain Room have been permanently installed at the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE in 2018 and the Jackalope Collection in Melbourne, respectively (2019).
Their work is also found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum London, the Maxine & Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art Detroit, the YUZ Foundation Shanghai, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art LA.
DRIFT reconnects humanity with nature through technology. DRIFT manifests the phenomena and hidden properties of nature with the use of technology in order to learn from the Earth’s underlying mechanisms and to re-establish our connection to it.
Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta founded DRIFT in 2007 after graduating from the Design Academy in Eindhoven. With a multi-disciplinary team of 64, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances. They first collaborated on Gordijn’s graduation project, Fragile Future, which saw a number of ball-shaped LED lamps with real dandelion seeds glued onto them, giving the bulbs a flower-like appearance. With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s work illuminates the parallels between man-made and natural structures through deconstructive, interactive and innovative processes. The artists raise fundamental questions about what life is, and explore a positive scenario for the future. Fragile Future turned out to be the most successful project of DRIFT so far.
All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. However, the confined parametres of a museum or a gallery does not always do justice to a body of work. Rather, architecture or the public sphere can often help it to reach its potential. DRIFT brings people, space and nature on to the same frequency, inspiring audiences to reconnect to our planet.
DRIFT has realised numerous exhibitions and created projects from around the world. Their work has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London UK, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the UTA Artist Space, Atlanta, GA, the Garage Museum, Moscow, Russia and the Mint Museum, Charlotte, CA among others. Their work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the San Francisco Musem of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK.
They duo have won many awards around the world for their Fragile Future collection, including the 1st Prize Stichting ArtiParti in 2006 as well as the International Design Prize ‘Lights of the future’ for the German Design Council. In 2010, their Concrete Chandelier won a prize at the Moët-Hennessy Pavillion of Art and Design. Their work is also widely praised within the Netherlands, where they won the 1st Prize of the ZomerExpo at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and the Finest Light Sculpture Prize for Interieur, Kortrijk. Their work Flylight was rewarded with Best Piece of Arte Laguna, in Venice. More recently, in 2019 they were selected as Designer of the Year with the Dezeen Awards for their work Franchise Freedom.
Studio Job is a ground-breaking art and design studio based in the Netherlands and Milan. Led by Job Smeets (b.1969), a pioneer of contemporary conceptual and sculptural art and design, he founded Studio Job in 1998 in the renaissance spirit, combining traditional and modern techniques to produce once-in-a-lifetime objects. Smeets leads a team of highly talented craftspeople to produce art pieces, projects and products in their atelier in the Netherlands. The studio works across art, interiors and product design with a vast range of high profile clients, galleries, and brands.
In the Studio Job atelier, a vast range of crafts are practiced, where traditional craftspeople such as sculptors and specialists in casting bronze and making stained-glass windows and hand-painting work alongside experts adept in using lasers and 3D printing. In both the atelier and Job’s creative studio, technique, science, design and art come together in their work as examples of what can be described as Gesamtkunstwerk – a total art work or an all embracing art form.
Studio Job are pioneers of contemporary conceptual and sculptural design. The results range from bronze artwork in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, to the national stamp of the Netherlands featuring the Dutch King (forty million pieces produced), the unique life-size bronze sculptures on Miami Beach, to the one-off Wunderkammer curiosity cabinet produced for Swarovski in Innsbruck, Austria.
All Studio Job projects are distinguished by a love of detail, freedom of expression, and functional art. With more than 400 exhibitions and solo shows around the world, Studio Job’s work can be found in most important museum collections. Their iconic, heraldic and cartoon-like sculptures are prized by collectors world-wide. Proclaimed one of the most influential studios by the Financial Times, Studio Job are passionate about building up an oeuvre that is becoming increasingly extravagant in its details and increasingly personal.
Studio Job work across many areas including art, design, fashion, architecture and interiors having worked with a vast range of high profile clients including sculptures for Gufram, Barneys and Land Rover, set design for Viktor & Rolf and Mika, and product collections for many brands such as Swatch, Alessi, Moooi and Pepsi to name a few. In 2017 Studio Job teamed up with Italian manufacturer Seletti to form the joint brand BLOW producing products in their pop spirit with a radical twist. Inspired by the city, 2019 Job Smeets opened his new base in Porta Venezia, Milan joining the new wave of Italian post-modernists.
Job Smeets is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most influential players within design and art. His highly collectable work creates a bridge between object and product by merging functional art with ground-breaking concepts.
Charles Trevelyan was born in 1974 in Australia. With a background in material science and engineering, Charles navigated a gradual transition from the sciences to the arts before finding a natural home for his work at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in 2007. Along the way, Charles developed a style of work that references a diverse spectrum of influences including the natural textures and colour palettes that surrounded him during his upbringing in Australia, cellular and crystalline morphology that emerged in the electron microscopy projects from his earlier career to more recent interests such as the extraordinary range of intriguing patterns found in aerial photographs that result from unintentional interactions between industrial and agricultural land usage and natural landforms.
Eschewing traditional methods due to his unusual path into making, Charles embraces material and process exploration to develop furniture, lighting and design objects inspired by the varying ways in which people respond to the textures, colours and structures of the natural world. He’s interested in the manner in which small fluctuations shape our perception of form and the inferences we draw and seeks resonance points on continuums of variation where an object can transition from unbalanced or awkward to graceful through a process of incremental alterations in a given characteristic. With each creation, he seeks a balance between ambiguity and familiarity, interlinking form, colour, and texture to provoke curiosity in the observer.
Mostly favouring physical models and prototypes over sketching, Charles alternates between material experimentation and making with each aspect feeding back into the other in an incremental developmental process that is deliberately detached from any notion of a final destination or function. He creates test pieces, models and maquettes using an array of materials and processes in his studio, bringing together the physicality of the hand-worked sculpting, casting and texturing materials with the detail and precision of digital fabrication techniques. The new Gyre table lamp series encapsulates many of these elements of his practice, combining a careful study of sculptural form with an intensive process of experimentation to develop a unique self-coloured texture that mimics the variety found in natural textures.
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