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. 

 
 

Read A Conversation Between Ferrari Sheppard & Michèle Lamy On The Occasion Of His Solo Exhibition @ UTA Artist Space →

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Ferrari Sheppard is an enigmatic, multi-disciplinary artist whose practice defies classification, and lives firmly at the center of a three-dimensional venn diagram. Likewise, the work of Michèle Lamy is as fluid and instinctive as it is crystallized in her unmistakable and ever-expansive character. She is not just a maven of fashion, design, and art, or an innovator of music and former restaurateur. She is a cultivator of community and expression. Sheppard is not just a painter, writer, photographer and music producer. He is an activist who has worked to provide relief aid in Haiti, shape economic policy and development in South Africa, and shine light on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It makes perfect sense that the two of them would fortuitously meet at Mr. Chow’s while stepping outside for a cigarette. Sheppard’s recent solo exhibition of paintings, Positions of Power, at UTA Artist Space is a testament to the mistreatment of a generation for profit by the criminal justice system. They are love letters to those who carried the weight of the “war on drugs” and risked it all in pursuit of freedom in the United States. Their structural composition is the result of an almost unconscious, improvised dance. A process that the artist refers to as “walking while painting.” The figures are laid heavy with dark brown and black pigments that visibly absorb light, and are gilded with a reflective gold trim, creating a balance that feels harmonious and befitting. At the center of the gallery’s main space lies a brutalist, three-pronged elmwood bench of mythical giant proportions. A place to put everything down and spend some time with the work. A creation that could only come from the collective minds of Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens. And the perfect place for these two chameleonic masters of material, sound, and ceremony to discuss their work. Read more.

Read An Excerpt Of A Conversation Between Rick Owens and Photographer Rick Castro →

Rick Castro is a legend in the queer underground scene of 1980s and 1990s Los Angeles. It was a time when Santa Monica Boulevard was rich with male hustlers, shirtless in the California sun, and the nightclubs were liminal landscapes of desire and liberation. To those who know him, he is "The Fetish King." Alongside artists like Ron Athey, Catherine Opie, Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan, Vaginal Davis, Kembra Pfahler, and Bruce LaBruce, Castro utilizes queer identity and the physicality of the body to express themes of marginalization and oppression. Click here to read more.

"Rick Owens: Furniture" Exhibition @ MOCA Pacific Design Center In Los Angeles

MOCA presents Rick Owens: Furniture, an exhibition of work by renowned Paris-based fashion and furniture designer Rick Owens. The exhibition includes recent furniture, a new group of large-scale sculptures, and videos by Owens, alongside a selection of works by the late artist and musician Steven Parrino. Best known for the iconic, eponymous clothing label he started in Los Angeles in 1994, Owens has consistently drawn inspiration for his fashion collections and sculptural furniture from a vast array of art historical sources that span modernist design, brutalist architecture, monochrome painting, minimal art, and avant-garde dance. Since 2007 Owens has applied a punk and anarchist sensibility to furniture design as well, creating brutal and elegant forms out of marble, alabaster, bronze, ox bone, leather, concrete, and plywood. In addition to showcasing works in Owens's signature materials, this exhibition marks the artist's foray into foam and rock crystal. Rick Owens: Furniture was organized in close collaboration with Michèle Lamy, Owen's longtime partner and the primary creative force and producer of the furniture line. Rick Owens: Furniture will be on view until April 2, 2017 at MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Read Our Interview Of Michele Lamy On The Occasion Of Rick Owens' First Museum Exhibition Of Furniture →

On a cold, rainy night, the day before the private opening, we huddled in the cab of a moving truck to chat about furniture, music and fashion. It may have been a symbolic coincidence that Michele Lamy was in the driver's seat, clutching on to the huge steering wheel, but maybe it wasn't. It's true – going at it alone and organizing a massive exhibition of her husband's furniture line is not a small task. But it’s obvious that she is used to it and loves the process, and Rick is happy to take a back seat. Click here to read more. 

Watch The Backstage Footage of Rick Owens' Spring Summer 2016 "Cyclops" Collection

This women’s spring collection is entitled Cyclops – a mythological creature, formidable, with focused vision. Who among us wouldn’t appreciate that kind of description? In the spring men’s collection, which shares the same name, that focused vision was propulsive and aggressive. When applied to women, I see that focused vision being more about nourishment, sisterhood/motherhood and regeneration; women raising women, women becoming women, and women supporting women – a world of women I know little about and can only attempt to amuse in my own small way. text by Rick Owens. Film by Matteo Carcelli and Luke Mayes

Read Our Round-Up Review of Paris Fashion Week 2015 →

Again, I will have to touch upon what makes this particular round unique to the industry and important for fashion. But honesty, do I actually need to make an argument concerning Paris and its total domination of conceptual fashion? OK, here’s an argument for you: Raf Simons, Rick Owens, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yammamoto, Dries Van Noten, Martin Margiela, Junya Wattanabe, Olivier Rousteing, and need I continue? A lot happens at Paris: some bad, some good, and some utterly transcendent. It’s too much to write about really. It’s the longest of the fashion weeks and it can be easy to forget about incredible shows mere days after they happened. Today as I am baffled yet excited over the announcement of Demna Gvasalia of Vetements being named creative director to Balenciaga while former Balenciaga godhead Nicolas Ghesquiere continues to alter the fabric of what we know to be Louis Vuitton, I almost forgot that Rick Owens put on the funniest and most conceptual collection of the week. So another season is over, and the buying begins. See you at the menswear shows. Click here to read the full review. Text by Adam Lehrer.