“What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.” Greil Marcus — Thursday August 27th — —

The idea is to die young as late as possible. — Ashley Montagu — Thursday August 27th — —

I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time. — Nayyirah Waheed — Thursday August 27th — —

The Banana Show

The infamous(ly great) Studio Job returns once again with an incredible new show. For ‘The Banana Show’, the Antwerp- and Amsterdam-based studio of Job Smeets and partner in crime Nynke Tynagel, created a series of lamps – fitting their subversive aesthetic perfectly – shaped like peeled bananas for an exhibition which opened last month in the Belgian Samuel Vanhoegaerden Gallery. The limited-edition collection of Banana Lamps comprises seven different lights, including five standing models held up in different positions by the curved representations of a banana’s peeled skin, as well as a hanging wall light and an oversized version. Each light features a polished bronze skin and an etched mouth-blown glass fruit filled with LED lights. The show also includes the Buoy Mirror, which has a red ring-shaped frame with four white bands and resembles a lifebuoy. The facet-cut mirror features sintered glass and hand-painted banana graphics in keeping with the exhibition’s theme. Seven new ink banana drawings on A2 paper in oak frames will be displayed alongside 30 drawings taken from Job Smeets’ archive from 1998 to 2005.

Bananas are the most popular fruit in the world… a nice reference to the other icons of the Pop Art, the Marilyns, the Campbell’s Soups, the Dollars signs, Coca-Cola… distilling the beauty out of the popular is an art form itself.

The exhibition also coincides with the release of a book entitled Desegnaĵoj – the first monograph of Smeets’ drawings. The studio is also showing new editions to its Paper collection. A wooden desk and a sideboard – both one-offs – are made from polyurethane-coated papier-mâché with polished bronze feet and handles.

Studio Job was founded in 2000 by Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel both graduates of the Design Academy Eindhoven now based in Antwerp and Amsterdam. They redefine the applied arts for the contemporary age. Their collaboration has created highly expressive, mainly one-off or limited edition works, from the outset. Opulent, intricate and ironic, Studio Job combine an extraordinarily high level of craftsmanship with extreme ornamentation. They reference both the traditional and the topical, the organic and the artificial. This narrative conveys a tension between the good and the bad exploring all facets of each.

Photography by Loek Blonk

The exhibition is runs until 27 September 2015 at the Samuel Vanhoegaerden Gallery, located at the Zeedijk 720 in Knokke, Belgium. 

For more information see here