Design Miami Review: Reflections on a Future Golden Age of Design

 
A disco ball flattened on a basketball hoop.

Rotganzen
Quelle Basket, Miami Edition, 2022
Vintage Basketball Hoop, Quelle Fête
Mirror object: glass mirror, foam, grout, glue
Basket hoop: metal ring with fabric netting
62 x 69 x 80 cm
Edition of 12

 


text by Jennifer Piejko


There isn’t much time to sit down, considering all the seating options. For the eighteenth year in a row, Design Miami has set up next to the Miami Convention Center during Art Basel Miami Beach, bringing galleries, presentations, and talks to Pride Park. 

The fair’s curatorial director, Maria Cristina Didero, leads a program with the theme “The Golden Age: Looking to the Future,” which celebrates “a tomorrow of our own creation.” Looks like tomorrow can go many ways, including enthusiasm, or, if not, at least surrender to amusement: there are Gaetano Pesce and Matthieu Blazy’s lustrous dripped resin chairs for Bottega Veneta sitting in a prismatic half-circle, offering gleeful, freeform optimism (and one of them even a cheeky smile); Finnish designer Kim Simonsson’s mossy children and miniature astronauts occupying levels of an industrial metal scaffolding installation by Urban Umbrella at New York’s Jason Jacques Gallery; Amsterdam’s Rademakers gallery’s room of deflated, dripping, gluttonous disco balls by the collective Rotganzen.

 
 

Lots of designs for tomorrow incorporate historical elements into their design as well: the collection of Brazilian modernist pieces including work by Joaquim Tenreiro, Jorge Zalszupin, and José Zanine Caldas at Rio de Janeiro’s Mercado Moderno; sensual, weathered wood and stone by Natasha Dakhli and Giancarlo Valle at New York’s Magen H Gallery; warm bronze seating by Ingrid Donat, monumental Rick Owens chairs, and radiant, alien translucent cubes by Niko Koronis, shown by Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery; Maestro Dobel Tequila constructed their “Artpothecary” in the center of the fair, offering a pink crossroads of sorts in the installation The Mexican Golden Age by Mexico City-based design studio Clásicos Mexicanos, as well as their new Latinx Art Prize with El Museo del Barrio in New York, awarded for the first time next fall. 

A number of booths also took this year’s theme as a prompt for starting tomorrow at the beginning—looking backward. New York’s Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts had a booth of historical works, many of them screens and dividers, including Nicola D’Ascenzo’s freestanding stained-glass wall. The geometric Art Deco florals of The Chestnut Street Window (c. 1925) was made for the Philadelphia luncheonette Horn & Hardart, the coffee and sandwich dispensary that revolutionized “fast food.” Samuel Yellin’s Gates (1912–15), ornate black wrought-iron gates from a grand private residence, rest on a nearby wall; so do 1920s and ’30s fire screens by William Hunt Diederich and Adalbert Szabo, the latter made for the transatlantic ocean liner S.S. Normandie. 

A array of furniture with a gold table, wood accents in the back, and balloned shaped chairs.

The Future Perfect’s presentation at Design Miami/ 2022, Booth G09.
Photo: Joseph Kramm. Courtesy the artists and The Future Perfect.

As with so many art and design fairs, there are a fair number of mirrored works, providing lots of selfie opportunities. One of the most popular, the squiggly, tentacled gold wall mirrors shown by the Haas Brothers’ Gallery All, literally framed rose-colored glass. The simple change to the standard mirror gave passersby a chance to sneak in a little self-flattery and self-reflection, the little boost that it takes to keep moving on a long day. 

 
 

Haas Brothers "Haas Angeles" @ UTA Artist Space In Los Angeles

UTA Artist Space presents Haas Angeles, the first exhibition in Los Angeles by multi-faceted sculptors, designers, craftsmen, and artists The Haas Brothers. Their internationally renowned work defies strict categorization, as do the fraternal twins themselves, disrupting both the design and art world with their playful and provocative biomorphic creations. Haas Angeles will be on view until October 14, 2017 at UTA Artist Space, 670 S Anderson St, Los Angeles, CA. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Private Opening Of The "Human Condition" Group Show Curated by John Wolf At A Former Hospital in Los Angeles

Human Condition is an immersive, site-specific exhibition that features the work of sixty emerging and established artists in a uniquely challenging space: a former hospital in West Adams, previously known as the Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center. Curated and produced by the Los Angeles-based art advisor John Wolf, Human Condition invites artists to re-contextualize the hospital’s functional history—over 40,000 square feet of it—as a venue to explore what it means to be human. Human Condition is a unique opportunity to experience artwork outside the confines of a typical art space. In using the skeletal remains of the hospital and its discarded medical supplies, artists and viewers are encouraged to explore the notion of what we leave behind—from objects to human history. Human Condition opens to the public on October 1, 2016 and runs through November 30, 2016. Address: 2231 S Western Ave. Los Angeles, CA. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Getting Afreaky: Check Out Our Interview and Studio Tour Of The Mystical Creative Force of Nature That Is The Haas Brothers →

The Haas brothers seem like mystical ambassadors from the future. However, they are not here to portend of doom and gloom, like the current headlines may lead you to predict. Indeed, the future looks pretty bright according to Nikolai and Simon Haas – fraternal twins who make high-end sculptural objects that only the very lucky can afford, but are almost talismanic in their complexity and humorous in their intentional simplicity. The materials the brothers use mimic natural and rare phenomena in nature. This gives their work a sexual energy that takes phallic and vaginal forms, replete with folds and shafts and rounded curves that could make the prudish contingent quite sensitive. Put the work together and it looks like a combination of Maurice Sendak's menagerie of Wild Things and Dr. Seuss on too many tabs of acid. Click here to read the interview and see more pictures.