With sterile white cube displays now reminiscent of a bygone era, contextual displays have become the norm across the design industry. Independent talent, established brands and leading galleries are now predominantly showcasing their wares in fully furnished, home environments with exceptional work. The idea is to suggest – or clearly indicate – how their products and limited-view projects could actually live in the spaces they will eventually inhabit. Few, however, fully respond to existing conditions and histories that already exist.
Cue téte-a-téte, a group exhibition organized by New York’s emerging art and design platform Game machine in two very different locations last month Milan Design Week. Edited by Margherita Dosi Dolphinsassistant curator at the Design Museum, the site-focused responsive exhibition brought together artworks and furniture that imagine a wide range of contemporary independent talent. The carefully curated selection emphasized the various material and formal qualities of each site.
True to the relatively new platform’s mission to highlight the intersection between function, familiarity, and invention, the works on view embody the idea that play can carry as much weight as practical rigor.
At Villa Pestarini, Italian architect Franco Albini’s original residential project completed in 1939, works made of eggshell, glass, reflective metals and other complementary materials played up the house’s distinctive proportions and updated but slightly decorative details. The space was staged as a study stuck in time, personalized for quiet contemplation.
By Anna Dawson The officially inventive fused glass Calle Sconce shed soft light up and down, while her sun pendant gave the clever qualities of containment and expression. The hollow-edged hexagonal roof base emitted light through a gently bulging amber dome. The characteristic shape was repeated in Romain Basile Petrot’s Khemis Checkerboard game table.
A similar game was set with the official configuration Caleb Engstrom’s Dry Kiss Chair I & II program, produced in slightly luxurious crushed eggshell and lacquer. The villa’s ever-so-subtle nods to modern and art deco decor were translated through By Liyang Zhang Sconce for Florence curtain. Globe finials sat above a patinated brass volume projecting light through movable silk curtains.
In the Certosa area, the palette was completely different and distinctly industrial, recalling the former function of the complex. Semi-functional and non-functional sculptures rendered from rubber (Atelier Fomenta’s monumental but elastic Tables made of rubber), plastic (By Maha Alavi somewhat architectural cast resin Frooot Bowl), and metals (by Francesco Rosati Table For a Married Couple, consisting of two vertically positioned “téte-a-téte” chairs) reinforced the more raw spatial language of the site.
Photo by Elizabeth Karababa.
