A Deep Dive into a Century of Swimming and Style @ London’s Design Museum

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

text by Poppy Baring

Walking into this Design Museum exhibition doesn’t feel too dissimilar to walking into an indoor leisure center. After stepping down a wide white staircase and through a small corridor, you approach Splash!, a show investigating a century of swimming and style, together with the social and cultural impacts of the sport. This exhibition was designed, unsurprisingly, with swimming environments in mind. The central plinths, located in each of the rooms, which are divided into Pool, Lido, and Nature, are scale models of the three separate swimming spaces.

In the first room, Pool, these islands are models of the London Aquatic Centre and have been made from Storm Board, a recycled plastic waste that can later be remolded into different shapes. Entering this room, you are greeted by a large, bold lithograph poster that speaks to a poolside chicness that is often associated with the sport. The late 1920s poster was one of the first attempts to ‘brand’ the seaside as fashionable, bold, and modern. Seen next to this is a 1984 poster by David Hockney for the Los Angeles Olympics. A symbol of affluence and leisure, the poster celebrates California life and shows a swimmer immersed in a pool, with a pattern that mimics the one painted on Hockney’s own pool.

Overall, this room features interesting swimming treasures, namely Olympic and Paralympic swimsuits of medal winners past. The costumes and stories of Tom Daley, Yusra Mardini, and Ellie Robinson guide you down the room, where you then meet 1920s and 30s knitted swimsuits and swimwear catalogues. Labels explain the history of wool swimmers, starting in the 1920s, initially with the intention of promoting hygienic clothing, as well as magazines that advertise the “suit that changed bathing to swimming.”

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

Blue arrows painted on the floor then bring you into room two, Lido, which opens into a show of swimsuits and clothing. Aiming to include an extensive range of themes and topics, from architecture to fashion, politics, and fabric development, the exhibition can feel slightly overwhelming at points and sometimes, because of its broad objectives, fails to dive fully into one topic or another. The rise of mass tourism, sun protection trends, ‘homosexual activity,’ and changing beauty ideals are all discussed before you have had a chance to fully feel like you’ve entered the room. These weighty topics are paired next to swimwear-clad light blue mannequins, which don’t naturally transport you to the beach.

 

Rudi Gernreich, Monokini, around 1964. Jersey, Tricot. Courtesy of Fashion Museum Hasselt.

 

There are, however, a few iconic pieces that are thrilling to see in person. Pamela Anderson’s iconic 1990s red Baywatch swimsuit, seen by roughly 1.1 billion viewers weekly, is one, and a 1964 Monokini by Rudi Gernreich, which was designed in a statement about liberating women from hyper-sexualisation, is another. As visitors continue, swim caps from the 1970s and from Miu Miu’s 2016 collection also stand out, and the line-up of accessories from ‘bathing shoes’ to Speedos brings a sense of charming nostalgia to the show.

The third and final section of Splash! is Nature, which touches on folklore and myths associated with the sea. Century-old tales of Merfolk are addressed before discussing the niche and unexpected contemporary trend of mermaid-core. Finally, a fascinating film about the haenyeo-women of South Korea finishes the exhibition. This film brings visitors underwater with a woman who follows her mother twenty meters below sea level with no help from a breathing apparatus. This historic exploration for seafood and seaweed has been conducted by women for centuries, and is an intense but extraordinary end to a fact-filled summer exhibition.

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style’ is on view through the 17th of August at the Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High St, London, W8 6AG

Universal Fatigue: A Solo Exhibition By Mircea Suciu @ Blain | Southern in New York

Part of the Cluj School, Mircea Suciu (b. 1978) is regarded as one of Romania’s leading artists. During his formative years he witnessed the country’s tumultuous transition after the only violent overthrow of a communist government in the 1989 revolutions. Describing himself as an image creator rather than a traditional painter, Suciu mines and references art history and contemporary imagery, reducing down the elements and adding color-coded symbolism. He has ‘his own complex way of making things in which painting, photography, drawing and print all cooperate while playing their individual parts.’

Inspired by his former studies on the restoration of Baroque paintings, Suciu has developed a process he calls ‘monoprinting’. A photographic image is split into a grid of A4 surfaces, each one printed on an acetate sheet, onto which a layer of acrylic paint is applied. The paint acts as a ‘glue’ that adheres directly to the canvas and once dry, the acetate sheet is peeled off. The result is a transference of the printed image with associated faults and imperfections, which Suciu then 'restores' by re-painting with oil and acrylic paint. Sometimes, as with works in the Disintegration series, he overlays the image multiple times using various colors until he creates a surface that is barely recognizable from the original. As a final stage the whole image is repainted. This multi-layered process creates compositions of reinvented images which allude to history, memory and the eventual dissolution of all things.

Universal Fatigue is on view throughout February 22 at Blain | Southern 547 W 25th St, New York, NY. Courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern.  Photo by Cooper Dodd:

Opening of Archipelago: A Solo Exhibition by Arielle Pytka At Just One Eye in Los Angeles

Archipelago tells a story of an imaginary new world, perhaps here on Earth or in the stars. As a child, Pytka always dreamt of being an adventurer and cartographer in the early days of exploration. At fifteen, she crossed the Atlantic Ocean, crewing on a vintage sailboat and in 2015, she completed another transatlantic crossing, sailing in the Panerai Transat Classique, in which her team came in first place. All of this time at sea fueled her creative inspiration and interest in the discovery of distant new lands and people. The paintings in Archipelago are a reflection of her desires to map unknown places. She subconsciously began painting maps to destinations that do not exist on our globe. Some of these paintings are reminiscent of island chains in South East Asia, where she lived part-time for the last 5 years.

Archipelago is on view at Just One Eye 915 North Sycamore Ave. LA. photographs courtesy of Nina Prommer