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 is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout. After graduating at the Rotterdam Art Academy Van Lieshout quickly rose to fame with projects that travelled between the world of easy-clean design and the non-functional area of art: sculpture and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.
In 1995, Van Lieshout 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 toward 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. By investigating the thin line between manufacturing art and mass-producing functional objects, he seeks to find the boundaries between fantasy and function, between fertility and destruction. 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 in the port of Rotterdam AVL-Ville (2001)—a free state in the Rotterdam harbour, with a minimum of rules, a maximum of liberties, and the highest degree of autarky. All of these activities are conducted within Van Lieshout’s signature style of provocation—be it political or material.
Van Lieshout combines an imaginative aesthetic and ethic with a spirit of entrepreneurship; his work has motivated movements in the fields of architecture and ecology, and has been internationally celebrated, exhibited, and published. His works share a number of recurring themes, motives, and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex, and death—each of these trace the human individual in the face of a greater whole such as his well-known work the Domestikator (2015). This sculpture caused controversy before even being placed at the Louvre in Jardin de Tuilleries, but was adopted by Centre Pompidou where it was shown during FiAC (2017). Van Lieshout’s works have been included in the Gwangju, Venice, Yokohama, Christchurch, Shanghai and São Paulo biennials.
Maarten Baas (1978) is a Dutch designer, who graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002. His studio is based in ‘s-Hertogenbosch (NL).
Baas is considered one of the most influential artist designers of the early twenty-first century. His works straddle boundaries between art and design. He occupies a unique position in the field, embodying conceptual art, craftsmanship, installation, public space and performance into his oeuvre. He’s known for his rebellious, intellectual, theatrical and artistic style. Baas’ most renowned works are Smoke, Clay and Real Time, that gave him instant worldwide recognition. 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.
“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 has continually reinvented himself for nearly six decades.
Often credited as the founding father of the American crafts movement, Castle has redefined sculpture and design by seamlessly merging the two into one discipline. He creates 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 honors and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.
Video Credit: Alison Castle and Friedman Benda
Vincenzo De Cotiis, architect and artist was born in 1958 in Gonzaga, Italy. He studied architecture at the Milan Politecnico and founded his studio and gallery in 1997.
The beauty of the patina generated by time is the leitmotiv that is reflected both in his architectural and luxury interior designs throughout the world. A research that is based on a contemporary appropriation of recycled materials, often marked by time and wear, and reinterpreted through the integration of new and precious materials. The creative process is the outcome of a constant intellectual and artistic layering, fueled by a precise artisan lymph.
An aesthetic infused with “perfect imperfection” is obtained by initial decomposition followed by recomposition, passing through the use of new materials and their expressive potential, thus generating works that recall nature in the abstract.
Vincenzo De Cotiis is considered one of the protagonists of the international contemporary design scene. His works, highly collectible unique pieces, are exhibited at his gallery in Milan, and at leading international design fairs, such as Design Miami / Basel, PAD London, Design Dubai, TEFAF and Art Paris.
“My approach is about imbuing bronze with warmth and vitality by borrowing scarification techniques and visual motifs from tribal societies,” says Donat.
Ingrid Donat is a French- Swedish artist born in 1957. Donat trained at École des Beaux Arts and later she met with Sylva Bernt, who instructed her in the art of sculpture. During the 80’s sculptor Diego Giacometti pushed her to start creating her own furniture.
Now, Donat currently stands as one of the most influential living artists in Decorative Arts. Her sculptured bronze furniture pieces exist as a symbiosis between the sophistication of Art Deco against the force of Tribal Art. Her creations take a painterly approach to the weighty medium of bronze.
Donat draws upon a diverse range of decorating influences including tribal tattooing. The works of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Armand-Albert Rateau have inspired the characters and intricate patterns in her art. Donat crosses time without ever anchoring herself in the trends of the moment.
She expresses a universal language as in the era of the first civilizations. Her timeless work needs to be seen and touched to be truly understood.
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.
Frederik Molenschot was born in 1981, is graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, currently works in Amsterdam, and is part of the Dutch Design Movement. His degree was earned with studies in man and public space and he focused on connecting people and their environments.
The founder of Studio Molen, Molenschot is a blur of constant energy, forever creating and developing new ideas and inspiring people. Molenschot crafts his work by hand and displays incredible diversity. He has a deep interest in the artificial and natural elements of our surroundings. His aim is to transport the viewer’s senses to a new level.
Molenschot is best known for his cast bronze lighting structures such as his body of works City light which he hand-shaped into detailed formations to channel and direct light. His work is inspired by city lights and the night sky which visualize a vision of a future city.
He says, “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.”
A Southern California native born in 1962, the acclaimed fashion designer Rick Owens displays a
demanding and singular aesthetic in fashion. His original vision plays on material. Owens lives and works in Paris, but the dark, minimalist style of his designs was created in the United States when he started out making bespoke furniture for his bunker-style loft in Los Angeles. Working with craftsmen of the highest caliber, he has developed a collection of pieces that express his signature style in cut, volume, and plan.
His designs evoke original furniture through archetypes. There are a number of typologies: the ceremonial chair Curial, the Trident chair with its structure, and the Halfbox armchair crafted from a chest. Through his choice of subtle and rare materials, Owens suggests the beauty of nature and develops a contrasting palette of black and white that confirms his taste for the monochrome. He juxtaposes values to compose three-dimensional pieces that fully reflect his own style. Through fashion, design, and furniture, he cuts and shapes a transversal and global universe.
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 re-connects humanity with nature through technology.
Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn (1980) and Ralph Nauta (1978) founded DRIFT in 2007. With a multi-disciplinary team of 64, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances.
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.
With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s works of art illuminate 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.
All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. The confined parameters of a museum or a gallery does not always do justice to a body of work, rather it often comes to its potential in the public sphere or through architecture. DRIFT brings people, space and nature on to the same frequency, uniting audiences with experiences that inspire a reconnection to our planet.
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.
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 is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout. After graduating at the Rotterdam Art Academy Van Lieshout quickly rose to fame with projects that travelled between the world of easy-clean design and the non-functional area of art: sculpture and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.
In 1995, Van Lieshout 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 toward 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. By investigating the thin line between manufacturing art and mass-producing functional objects, he seeks to find the boundaries between fantasy and function, between fertility and destruction. 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 in the port of Rotterdam AVL-Ville (2001)—a free state in the Rotterdam harbour, with a minimum of rules, a maximum of liberties, and the highest degree of autarky. All of these activities are conducted within Van Lieshout’s signature style of provocation—be it political or material.
Van Lieshout combines an imaginative aesthetic and ethic with a spirit of entrepreneurship; his work has motivated movements in the fields of architecture and ecology, and has been internationally celebrated, exhibited, and published. His works share a number of recurring themes, motives, and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex, and death—each of these trace the human individual in the face of a greater whole such as his well-known work the Domestikator (2015). This sculpture caused controversy before even being placed at the Louvre in Jardin de Tuilleries, but was adopted by Centre Pompidou where it was shown during FiAC (2017). Van Lieshout’s works have been included in the Gwangju, Venice, Yokohama, Christchurch, Shanghai and São Paulo biennials.
Maarten Baas (1978) is a Dutch designer, who graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002. His studio is based in ‘s-Hertogenbosch (NL).
Baas is considered one of the most influential artist designers of the early twenty-first century. His works straddle boundaries between art and design. He occupies a unique position in the field, embodying conceptual art, craftsmanship, installation, public space and performance into his oeuvre. He’s known for his rebellious, intellectual, theatrical and artistic style. Baas’ most renowned works are Smoke, Clay and Real Time, that gave him instant worldwide recognition. 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.
“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 has continually reinvented himself for nearly six decades.
Often credited as the founding father of the American crafts movement, Castle has redefined sculpture and design by seamlessly merging the two into one discipline. He creates 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 honors and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.
Video Credit: Alison Castle and Friedman Benda
Vincenzo De Cotiis, architect and artist was born in 1958 in Gonzaga, Italy. He studied architecture at the Milan Politecnico and founded his studio and gallery in 1997.
The beauty of the patina generated by time is the leitmotiv that is reflected both in his architectural and luxury interior designs throughout the world. A research that is based on a contemporary appropriation of recycled materials, often marked by time and wear, and reinterpreted through the integration of new and precious materials. The creative process is the outcome of a constant intellectual and artistic layering, fueled by a precise artisan lymph.
An aesthetic infused with “perfect imperfection” is obtained by initial decomposition followed by recomposition, passing through the use of new materials and their expressive potential, thus generating works that recall nature in the abstract.
Vincenzo De Cotiis is considered one of the protagonists of the international contemporary design scene. His works, highly collectible unique pieces, are exhibited at his gallery in Milan, and at leading international design fairs, such as Design Miami / Basel, PAD London, Design Dubai, TEFAF and Art Paris.
“My approach is about imbuing bronze with warmth and vitality by borrowing scarification techniques and visual motifs from tribal societies,” says Donat.
Ingrid Donat is a French- Swedish artist born in 1957. Donat trained at École des Beaux Arts and later she met with Sylva Bernt, who instructed her in the art of sculpture. During the 80’s sculptor Diego Giacometti pushed her to start creating her own furniture.
Now, Donat currently stands as one of the most influential living artists in Decorative Arts. Her sculptured bronze furniture pieces exist as a symbiosis between the sophistication of Art Deco against the force of Tribal Art. Her creations take a painterly approach to the weighty medium of bronze.
Donat draws upon a diverse range of decorating influences including tribal tattooing. The works of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Armand-Albert Rateau have inspired the characters and intricate patterns in her art. Donat crosses time without ever anchoring herself in the trends of the moment.
She expresses a universal language as in the era of the first civilizations. Her timeless work needs to be seen and touched to be truly understood.
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.
Frederik Molenschot was born in 1981, is graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, currently works in Amsterdam, and is part of the Dutch Design Movement. His degree was earned with studies in man and public space and he focused on connecting people and their environments.
The founder of Studio Molen, Molenschot is a blur of constant energy, forever creating and developing new ideas and inspiring people. Molenschot crafts his work by hand and displays incredible diversity. He has a deep interest in the artificial and natural elements of our surroundings. His aim is to transport the viewer’s senses to a new level.
Molenschot is best known for his cast bronze lighting structures such as his body of works City light which he hand-shaped into detailed formations to channel and direct light. His work is inspired by city lights and the night sky which visualize a vision of a future city.
He says, “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.”
A Southern California native born in 1962, the acclaimed fashion designer Rick Owens displays a
demanding and singular aesthetic in fashion. His original vision plays on material. Owens lives and works in Paris, but the dark, minimalist style of his designs was created in the United States when he started out making bespoke furniture for his bunker-style loft in Los Angeles. Working with craftsmen of the highest caliber, he has developed a collection of pieces that express his signature style in cut, volume, and plan.
His designs evoke original furniture through archetypes. There are a number of typologies: the ceremonial chair Curial, the Trident chair with its structure, and the Halfbox armchair crafted from a chest. Through his choice of subtle and rare materials, Owens suggests the beauty of nature and develops a contrasting palette of black and white that confirms his taste for the monochrome. He juxtaposes values to compose three-dimensional pieces that fully reflect his own style. Through fashion, design, and furniture, he cuts and shapes a transversal and global universe.
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 re-connects humanity with nature through technology.
Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn (1980) and Ralph Nauta (1978) founded DRIFT in 2007. With a multi-disciplinary team of 64, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances.
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.
With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s works of art illuminate 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.
All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. The confined parameters of a museum or a gallery does not always do justice to a body of work, rather it often comes to its potential in the public sphere or through architecture. DRIFT brings people, space and nature on to the same frequency, uniting audiences with experiences that inspire a reconnection to our planet.
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.
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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 is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout. After graduating at the Rotterdam Art Academy Van Lieshout quickly rose to fame with projects that travelled between the world of easy-clean design and the non-functional area of art: sculpture and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.
In 1995, Van Lieshout 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 toward 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. By investigating the thin line between manufacturing art and mass-producing functional objects, he seeks to find the boundaries between fantasy and function, between fertility and destruction. 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 in the port of Rotterdam AVL-Ville (2001)—a free state in the Rotterdam harbour, with a minimum of rules, a maximum of liberties, and the highest degree of autarky. All of these activities are conducted within Van Lieshout’s signature style of provocation—be it political or material.
Van Lieshout combines an imaginative aesthetic and ethic with a spirit of entrepreneurship; his work has motivated movements in the fields of architecture and ecology, and has been internationally celebrated, exhibited, and published. His works share a number of recurring themes, motives, and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex, and death—each of these trace the human individual in the face of a greater whole such as his well-known work the Domestikator (2015). This sculpture caused controversy before even being placed at the Louvre in Jardin de Tuilleries, but was adopted by Centre Pompidou where it was shown during FiAC (2017). Van Lieshout’s works have been included in the Gwangju, Venice, Yokohama, Christchurch, Shanghai and São Paulo biennials.
Maarten Baas (1978) is a Dutch designer, who graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002. His studio is based in ‘s-Hertogenbosch (NL).
Baas is considered one of the most influential artist designers of the early twenty-first century. His works straddle boundaries between art and design. He occupies a unique position in the field, embodying conceptual art, craftsmanship, installation, public space and performance into his oeuvre. He’s known for his rebellious, intellectual, theatrical and artistic style. Baas’ most renowned works are Smoke, Clay and Real Time, that gave him instant worldwide recognition. 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.
“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 has continually reinvented himself for nearly six decades.
Often credited as the founding father of the American crafts movement, Castle has redefined sculpture and design by seamlessly merging the two into one discipline. He creates 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 honors and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.
Video Credit: Alison Castle and Friedman Benda
Vincenzo De Cotiis, architect and artist was born in 1958 in Gonzaga, Italy. He studied architecture at the Milan Politecnico and founded his studio and gallery in 1997.
The beauty of the patina generated by time is the leitmotiv that is reflected both in his architectural and luxury interior designs throughout the world. A research that is based on a contemporary appropriation of recycled materials, often marked by time and wear, and reinterpreted through the integration of new and precious materials. The creative process is the outcome of a constant intellectual and artistic layering, fueled by a precise artisan lymph.
An aesthetic infused with “perfect imperfection” is obtained by initial decomposition followed by recomposition, passing through the use of new materials and their expressive potential, thus generating works that recall nature in the abstract.
Vincenzo De Cotiis is considered one of the protagonists of the international contemporary design scene. His works, highly collectible unique pieces, are exhibited at his gallery in Milan, and at leading international design fairs, such as Design Miami / Basel, PAD London, Design Dubai, TEFAF and Art Paris.
“My approach is about imbuing bronze with warmth and vitality by borrowing scarification techniques and visual motifs from tribal societies,” says Donat.
Ingrid Donat is a French- Swedish artist born in 1957. Donat trained at École des Beaux Arts and later she met with Sylva Bernt, who instructed her in the art of sculpture. During the 80’s sculptor Diego Giacometti pushed her to start creating her own furniture.
Now, Donat currently stands as one of the most influential living artists in Decorative Arts. Her sculptured bronze furniture pieces exist as a symbiosis between the sophistication of Art Deco against the force of Tribal Art. Her creations take a painterly approach to the weighty medium of bronze.
Donat draws upon a diverse range of decorating influences including tribal tattooing. The works of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Armand-Albert Rateau have inspired the characters and intricate patterns in her art. Donat crosses time without ever anchoring herself in the trends of the moment.
She expresses a universal language as in the era of the first civilizations. Her timeless work needs to be seen and touched to be truly understood.
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.
Frederik Molenschot was born in 1981, is graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, currently works in Amsterdam, and is part of the Dutch Design Movement. His degree was earned with studies in man and public space and he focused on connecting people and their environments.
The founder of Studio Molen, Molenschot is a blur of constant energy, forever creating and developing new ideas and inspiring people. Molenschot crafts his work by hand and displays incredible diversity. He has a deep interest in the artificial and natural elements of our surroundings. His aim is to transport the viewer’s senses to a new level.
Molenschot is best known for his cast bronze lighting structures such as his body of works City light which he hand-shaped into detailed formations to channel and direct light. His work is inspired by city lights and the night sky which visualize a vision of a future city.
He says, “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.”
A Southern California native born in 1962, the acclaimed fashion designer Rick Owens displays a
demanding and singular aesthetic in fashion. His original vision plays on material. Owens lives and works in Paris, but the dark, minimalist style of his designs was created in the United States when he started out making bespoke furniture for his bunker-style loft in Los Angeles. Working with craftsmen of the highest caliber, he has developed a collection of pieces that express his signature style in cut, volume, and plan.
His designs evoke original furniture through archetypes. There are a number of typologies: the ceremonial chair Curial, the Trident chair with its structure, and the Halfbox armchair crafted from a chest. Through his choice of subtle and rare materials, Owens suggests the beauty of nature and develops a contrasting palette of black and white that confirms his taste for the monochrome. He juxtaposes values to compose three-dimensional pieces that fully reflect his own style. Through fashion, design, and furniture, he cuts and shapes a transversal and global universe.
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 re-connects humanity with nature through technology.
Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn (1980) and Ralph Nauta (1978) founded DRIFT in 2007. With a multi-disciplinary team of 64, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances.
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.
With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s works of art illuminate 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.
All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. The confined parameters of a museum or a gallery does not always do justice to a body of work, rather it often comes to its potential in the public sphere or through architecture. DRIFT brings people, space and nature on to the same frequency, uniting audiences with experiences that inspire a reconnection to our planet.
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.
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 is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout. After graduating at the Rotterdam Art Academy Van Lieshout quickly rose to fame with projects that travelled between the world of easy-clean design and the non-functional area of art: sculpture and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.
In 1995, Van Lieshout 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 toward 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. By investigating the thin line between manufacturing art and mass-producing functional objects, he seeks to find the boundaries between fantasy and function, between fertility and destruction. 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 in the port of Rotterdam AVL-Ville (2001)—a free state in the Rotterdam harbour, with a minimum of rules, a maximum of liberties, and the highest degree of autarky. All of these activities are conducted within Van Lieshout’s signature style of provocation—be it political or material.
Van Lieshout combines an imaginative aesthetic and ethic with a spirit of entrepreneurship; his work has motivated movements in the fields of architecture and ecology, and has been internationally celebrated, exhibited, and published. His works share a number of recurring themes, motives, and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex, and death—each of these trace the human individual in the face of a greater whole such as his well-known work the Domestikator (2015). This sculpture caused controversy before even being placed at the Louvre in Jardin de Tuilleries, but was adopted by Centre Pompidou where it was shown during FiAC (2017). Van Lieshout’s works have been included in the Gwangju, Venice, Yokohama, Christchurch, Shanghai and São Paulo biennials.
Maarten Baas (1978) is a Dutch designer, who graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2002. His studio is based in ‘s-Hertogenbosch (NL).
Baas is considered one of the most influential artist designers of the early twenty-first century. His works straddle boundaries between art and design. He occupies a unique position in the field, embodying conceptual art, craftsmanship, installation, public space and performance into his oeuvre. He’s known for his rebellious, intellectual, theatrical and artistic style. Baas’ most renowned works are Smoke, Clay and Real Time, that gave him instant worldwide recognition. 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.
“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 has continually reinvented himself for nearly six decades.
Often credited as the founding father of the American crafts movement, Castle has redefined sculpture and design by seamlessly merging the two into one discipline. He creates 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 honors and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.
Video Credit: Alison Castle and Friedman Benda
Vincenzo De Cotiis, architect and artist was born in 1958 in Gonzaga, Italy. He studied architecture at the Milan Politecnico and founded his studio and gallery in 1997.
The beauty of the patina generated by time is the leitmotiv that is reflected both in his architectural and luxury interior designs throughout the world. A research that is based on a contemporary appropriation of recycled materials, often marked by time and wear, and reinterpreted through the integration of new and precious materials. The creative process is the outcome of a constant intellectual and artistic layering, fueled by a precise artisan lymph.
An aesthetic infused with “perfect imperfection” is obtained by initial decomposition followed by recomposition, passing through the use of new materials and their expressive potential, thus generating works that recall nature in the abstract.
Vincenzo De Cotiis is considered one of the protagonists of the international contemporary design scene. His works, highly collectible unique pieces, are exhibited at his gallery in Milan, and at leading international design fairs, such as Design Miami / Basel, PAD London, Design Dubai, TEFAF and Art Paris.
“My approach is about imbuing bronze with warmth and vitality by borrowing scarification techniques and visual motifs from tribal societies,” says Donat.
Ingrid Donat is a French- Swedish artist born in 1957. Donat trained at École des Beaux Arts and later she met with Sylva Bernt, who instructed her in the art of sculpture. During the 80’s sculptor Diego Giacometti pushed her to start creating her own furniture.
Now, Donat currently stands as one of the most influential living artists in Decorative Arts. Her sculptured bronze furniture pieces exist as a symbiosis between the sophistication of Art Deco against the force of Tribal Art. Her creations take a painterly approach to the weighty medium of bronze.
Donat draws upon a diverse range of decorating influences including tribal tattooing. The works of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Armand-Albert Rateau have inspired the characters and intricate patterns in her art. Donat crosses time without ever anchoring herself in the trends of the moment.
She expresses a universal language as in the era of the first civilizations. Her timeless work needs to be seen and touched to be truly understood.
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.
Frederik Molenschot was born in 1981, is graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, currently works in Amsterdam, and is part of the Dutch Design Movement. His degree was earned with studies in man and public space and he focused on connecting people and their environments.
The founder of Studio Molen, Molenschot is a blur of constant energy, forever creating and developing new ideas and inspiring people. Molenschot crafts his work by hand and displays incredible diversity. He has a deep interest in the artificial and natural elements of our surroundings. His aim is to transport the viewer’s senses to a new level.
Molenschot is best known for his cast bronze lighting structures such as his body of works City light which he hand-shaped into detailed formations to channel and direct light. His work is inspired by city lights and the night sky which visualize a vision of a future city.
He says, “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.”
A Southern California native born in 1962, the acclaimed fashion designer Rick Owens displays a
demanding and singular aesthetic in fashion. His original vision plays on material. Owens lives and works in Paris, but the dark, minimalist style of his designs was created in the United States when he started out making bespoke furniture for his bunker-style loft in Los Angeles. Working with craftsmen of the highest caliber, he has developed a collection of pieces that express his signature style in cut, volume, and plan.
His designs evoke original furniture through archetypes. There are a number of typologies: the ceremonial chair Curial, the Trident chair with its structure, and the Halfbox armchair crafted from a chest. Through his choice of subtle and rare materials, Owens suggests the beauty of nature and develops a contrasting palette of black and white that confirms his taste for the monochrome. He juxtaposes values to compose three-dimensional pieces that fully reflect his own style. Through fashion, design, and furniture, he cuts and shapes a transversal and global universe.
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 re-connects humanity with nature through technology.
Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn (1980) and Ralph Nauta (1978) founded DRIFT in 2007. With a multi-disciplinary team of 64, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances.
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.
With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s works of art illuminate 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.
All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. The confined parameters of a museum or a gallery does not always do justice to a body of work, rather it often comes to its potential in the public sphere or through architecture. DRIFT brings people, space and nature on to the same frequency, uniting audiences with experiences that inspire a reconnection to our planet.
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.
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