Sou Fujimoto is the latest and youngest architect who designed the prestigious temporary structure in front of the Serpentine Gallery, which this year was opened on the 8th of June. Made out of 20mm steel poles the structure has taken in nearly 3800 square feet of the London gallery’s front lawn. It is designed as a flexible, multi-purpose social space, with a café inside it. Fujimoto and his team designed the building with the ambition to persuade people to enter and interact with the pavilion throughout its four-month presence in London's Kensington Gardens. The official photography of the pavilion was commissioned to my brother Iwan Baan. [ Continue reading ]
In 2008, the young photographer Pieter Henket took a picture of upcoming artist Lady Gaga, which eventually became the cover of her multiplatinum album The Fame. Basically from that moment Henket was a household name in contemporary glamour photography. In 2010, confirming this major status, the photograph of Lady Gaga was exhibited as an icon of the 21st century in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Twelve years had passed since Henket arrived in New York City in 1998 as a 19-year old to take up studies at the Film Academy. Instead of his original goal to become a filmmaker, Henket now officially was a major still photographer. [ Continue reading ]
The Belgian creative collective Captain Boomer is currently engaged in a initiative called the Sperm Whale Summer Tour in which the collective uses a lifelike sculpture of a beached sperm whale as an artistic and educational performance. After the very first beaching in 2008 in Scheveningen and subsequently in Antwerp, Oostende and Venray they landed on the shore of London’s river Thames at Greenwich. Through fake researchers around the whale a seemingly authentic scene is created. And due to the fact of actual scientists on site, the educational dimension is real. Those who are interested in sperm whales and why they beach will get an answer, but it also touches the element of a whale beaching as a societal spectacle. [ Continue reading ]
We really like the work of Do-Ho Suh which recently got covered in the Best Contemporary Korean Artists article on Dazed Digital. The Korean artist was born in 1962 in Seoul, Korea, and received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA in sculpture from Yale University. Interested in the malleability of space in both its physical and metaphorical manifestations, Do-Ho Suh constructs site-specific installations that question the boundaries of identity. His work explores the relation between individuality, collectivity, and anonymity. In 2001, Suh represented Korea at the Venice Biennale and subsequently participated in the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2010 Liverpool Biennial, and the 2012 Gwangju Biennial. [ Continue reading ]
We love how there is always a next level to everything. Recently we mentioned the fascinating use of 3D printing technology in the context of food, the designers of the aptly named Digital Grotesque astoundingly so have taken the technology and went way beyond most known earlier usage. The project was shown on a 1:3 scale at the Swiss Art Awards 2013 and will be fully launched early september. It features a fully-enclosed room, made using digital 3D printing techniques, with a mind bending eighty million surfaces which are totally gilded. [ Continue reading ]
Together with Fontanel, we were invited by the Guggenheim Bilbao to visit the Riotous Baroque exhibition and enjoy a little of Bilbao. While the weather in the Netherlands dipped into some early autumn, it was a good time to escape to this sunnier part of Europe. And flying to Bordeaux, driving myself along the coast to Bilbao wasn't bad at all.
After driving along one of the most beautiful coastlines of Europe, crossing Biarritz and San Sebastian, Bilbao feels like a real hidden gem, with Frank Gehry's Guggenheim as the pearl in the centre of the city. A beautiful place, in the late 20th century transformed from a dirty old port into one of the worlds most iconic art cities and very much not what you'd expect of a Spanish city. The mix of the old and new architecture, in combination with its clean streets, green parks and the fresh breeze from the sea, is beautifully translated in a new exhibition where the 17th-century baroque artists are perfectly mixed with contemporary art. [ Continue reading ]
We really look forward to the first major European exhibition of work by the American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia at De Pont in Tilburg starting the 5th of October 2013 in a collaboration with the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. DiCorcia who was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut and can be seen as one of the most influential contemporary photographers. The photographer first came to prominence in the 1970s with photographs that defied definition, existing in the space between documentary fact and movie-style fiction. The meticulous staging of quotidian scenes of family and friends lent the photographs of diCorcia an unparalleled sense of heightened drama and ambiguity. [ Continue reading ]
We are very inspired by the latest project of French photographer Vincent Fournier named Post Natural History. The marvelous project is based on current research regarding synthetic biology and the reprogramming of stem cells and is being exhibited for the public now at The Ravestijn Gallery in Amsterdam. Since visiting the Palais de la Découverte in Paris as a young boy, Fournier has highly been fascinated by the wonders of the world; such as astronomy, space travel, geology, biology and physics which clearly shows in his work. [ Continue reading ]
We have been following the in 2006 founded blog JJJJound by Justin R. Saunders for quite some years now. The mood board Saunders shares with friends has over the years evolved into a steady destination for all kinds of aesthetic inspiration. One of the friends who collaborates with Saunders on JJJJound is Claudio Marzano, with whom he created the first offline JJJJound exhibition named CORRESPONDENCE supported by adidas originals. [ Continue reading ]
The London-based artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin won the Deutsche Börse photography prize on the 10th of June with their fascinating 2012 book War Primer 2 which was published very limited to only 100 copies by Mack Books. They were presented with the £30,000 award by the film director Mike Figgis at the Photographers' Gallery in London. In the book Broomberg and Chanarin rework Bertolt Brecht's original War Primer from 1955 using internet screenshots and mobile phone pictures to comment on the role of photography in the "war on terror." Beside receiving praise for War Primer 2 this month, the duo also released another extremely fascinating book called The Holy Bible. In the publication the provocateurs have carefully overlaid images from The Archive of Modern Conflict onto each page of the Bible. The duo believes that their selected images are representative of the horror and madness of global catastrophes (Western) society has become insensitive to, due to the filtration of those images by mainstream media. [ Continue reading ]
Under Black Carpets is an incredible project by Ilona Gaynor, a designer with a critical attitude towards society. Gaynor's work is centred around design as plot and with Under Black Carpets she has taken the role of the masterful architect of a major heist. Raising funds through Kickstarter for the final stage of the project, Under Black Carpets already received a lot of media attention and has gone through an initial two years of research in various stages. The first year was supported and funded by the Ridley Scott Associates Residency award. In it's final stage the project takes the fascinating form of a collection of evidence created around a fictional meticulously calculated bank heist of five banks surrounding the One Wilshire skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles. [ Continue reading ]
After having met while studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Kirstie van Noort and Rogier Arents each went their own way. Van Noort prefers to do extensive research on materials or processes beforehand, using the information resulting from the research as a fundament for the story behind the end product. Rogier Arents on the other hand is a designer and communicator of scientific research. And although these approaches inhabit their differences, their first joint project distinctively named 'Color Collision' turned out to be very interesting. [ Continue reading ]
Last few days we stayed in Alentejo's countryside, close to the beautiful beaches of the southwest Portuguese coast, at Casa da Diná. A bed & breakfast run by the Portuguese and Uruguayan couple Dina Medeiros and Walter Betbeder Rosso. Traveled the world themselves they decided to set home at Malavado and combine Walter's atelier with this lovely bed & breakfast of four double rooms, a delicious homemade breakfast and now and then a dinner to share Dina's love for Portuguese cuisine.
While enjoying this lovely place, we got inspired by the works of Walter and his atelier. The beautiful earth-toned palette, the geometrical forms, simplicity and cubist style in contrast to his palettes incorporated in this world of simplicity. [ Continue reading ]
We really love the incredible ceramic sculptures designed by Japanese Kanazawa College of Art Bachelor graduate Hitomi Hosono. After complementary studies at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the graduation of a Masters degree at the Royal College of Art in London Hosono has perfected her craft and creates one of a kind botanical ceramic sculptures. The proces of creating her artworks roughly breaks down as follows; firstly it takes one month to create the mold, three intense weeks follow to attach the folliage, and it lastly takes up to five months to let the sculptures dry. The now London-based artist's lifelike depictions of leafage were recently awarded with a Perrier-Jouët Arts Salon Prize, a new award officiated by the producer of Champagne from the French Épernay region. [ Continue reading ]
Chanel n°5 first saw day in 1921 within a highly dynamic creative context. Since the Cubist revolution brought about by Picasso’s Demoiselles d’avignon, in 1907 and the advent of Futurism in italy in 1908, the avant-garde ceaselessly went about writing a particular modernity which would finally triumph at the dawn of the 1920s. From that moment abstraction spanned all forms of creativity, equally inspiring art, poetry, literature and music, and the fragrance of this new perfume which evoked a very mysterious flower, unless of course it didn’t firstly evoke a woman. [ Continue reading ]
The latest and possibly last installation by the legendary Christo is called the Big Air Package. Everything concerning the project is impressive, starting with the exhibition space. Built in the 1920s, the Gasometer on the Rhine-Herne Canal in Oberhausen, Germany, is one of the more appealing industrial monuments of the country. The former gas storage container is 117 meters tall and 67 meters wide, towering over any living creature. The inflatable Big Air Package itself, erupted within the Gasometer, is 94 meters high and 54 meters wide. [ Continue reading ]
East-London gallery, restaurant and performance space The Wapping Project is hosting as of the 24th of January a very interesting project named PASSAGE. The audiovisual immersive installation was first staged in the Leonardo da Vinci Museum in Milan in April 2012 and has now landed at the Boiler House in one of London's most interesting art venues. [ Continue reading ]
A beautiful silkscreen printed map of The Northern Sky. Limited to 500 pieces, handprinted and -numbered. [ Continue reading ]
Over the past year we've been working on an exhibition on denim which opened last week in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Putting together 350 years of denim history into a more than 100 meter long indigo timeline. A rich history including classic paintings from 'The Master of the Blue Jeans' and old sample books dating back to the 18th century, to the designs of Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, Maison Martin Margiela, Marithé + François Girbaud and Yves Saint Laurent - and one of the oldest Levi's and Lee jeans to Momotaro, Atelier Tossijn, Naked & Famous and Rapha - it's all there.
We've created a more than 100 meters long cabinet, starting like a loom in an almost black indigo colour, morphing to slate blue and finally ending in a bright white workshop. A three-dimensional timeline showing the rich history of 350 years of Blue Jeans. The exhibition is accompanied with a book we've designed together with Studio wilfredtimo, which will be available at Tenue de Nîmes (a.o.) anytime soon.
Blue Jeans — 23 November 2012 until 10 March 2013,
Centraal Museum, Nicolaaskerkhof 10, Utrecht, the Netherlands, open Tue - Sun 11.00h – 17.00h
For more images click here >
And more on Blue Jeans at the Centraal Museum after the click > [ Continue reading ]
Freunde von Freunden keeps on feeding us with beautifully shot portraits and inspiring interviews with creative people from all over the world. They’ve just put online the portrait of Barcelona based Ceramist Xavi Mañosa. Inherited the tradition from his father and now investigating the connection… [ Continue reading ]
'Everything goes right and left if you want it' is the title of the first publication on Sergei Sviatchenko, the good man behind Close Up and Private. The Berlin-based publisher Gestalten released this beautiful book featuring Sviatchenko's modern collages and keen eye on colour. "In the world of contemporary art, Sviatchenko is a provocateur. He draws on and harnesses all of the cultural tides he has experienced in 40 years of image-making. Sviatchenko’s oeuvre spans the known and the unimaginable. It cuts through the boundaries of traditional and contemporary visuals to merge pop culture with politics, personal memory with collective histories, and architecture and science with the logic of dreams." [ Continue reading ]
When Freunde von Freunden asked me who to visit when in the Netherlands, the first person that popped in mind was Nanna van Blaaderen. The Dutch textile and fashion designer, known for her almost sculptural knitted pieces, welcomed the FvF crew in her house and studio - resulting in a page long interview and and inspiring look behind the scenes and inspirations of Nanna. [ Continue reading ]
Today NOWNESS shared this super inspiring preview of Loris Gréaud's upcoming project: The Snorks, a concert for creatures. "The initial inspiration for the project lies in the idea that creatures would be living on our planet, their aesthetical and behavioural features matching an alien fantasy in every aspect, thereby awaking the desire of communicating with those "creatures". What if they live within our oceans, major component of our eco-system, could we get in touch with them?... Here begins an artistic journey and production that will last 36 months. An unusual temporality that can be understood through the following paradox: we have the ability to go on the Moon, to date the presence of water on Mars, yet we barely know anything about what composes the tremendous majority of the Earth... [ Continue reading ]
At the in retrospect seen successful Unseen photo fair, we discovered another series of photographs we really like. Dutch photographer Diana Scherer documented an archive of wild flowers, which she grew herself, in her series Nurture Studies which were on display at the stand of the Seelevel Gallery. In the spring of 2010 Scherer decided to fill her balcony with garden soil and planted wild flowers in vases within it. When the flowers were full-grown after six months the photographer removed them from the soil and broke the vases away, exposing the roots that retain the shape as an evocation of the now absent vase. [ Continue reading ]