Bottega Veneta Reopens Paris Flagship Store

On September 25th, Bottega Veneta unveiled its new Paris flagship store on the iconic Avenue Montaigne. It is the first store designed by and under the creative direction of Matthieu Blazy.

Combining Italian craftsmanship with a modernist sensibility, the near 800-square-meter space is defined by two essential materials: glass, native to Venice, and Italian walnut wood. Industrial square glass blocks are integrated into floor, ceiling, and walls, creating a grid geometry and diffuse, homogenous light throughout the store. Walnut wood panels frame the blocks, and also distinguish the transitional spaces of stairway and jewelry gallery corridor.

Interaction with original design and the handmade begins upon entry, where the front door features a one-of-a-kind glass handle by the Venice-based Japanese glass artist, Ritsue Mishima. Further brass hooks and handles throughout the store pick up on Blazy’s Drop motif, while single Drop elements on store mirrors create rippling reflections suggestive of Venice’s aquatic cityscape.

Photographs by Francois Halard

 
 

Bottega Veneta Celebrates Brazilian Culture @ Lina Bo Bardi’s Iconic Casa de Vidro

A square building with glowing orange floor-to-ceiling windows radiates behind a wall of dark palm fronds and trees.

Bottega Veneta’s cultural exchange series, The Square, was first introduced in Dubai in 2022. The Square SΓ£o Paulo is the latest in Bottega Veneta’s cultural exchange series, which was preceded by a second installment in Tokyo. Under the creative direction of Matthieu Blazy, the series brings together artists, guests, and the public in immersive, site-specific events that inspire curiosity and dialogue, and champion Bottega Veneta’s values of craft, creativity, and self-expression.

Marking Bottega Veneta’s 10-year anniversary in Brazil, The Square SΓ£o Paulo evolves beyond the custom square structures of Dubai and Tokyo with a curation by Mari Stockler in the lush setting of Casa de Vidro, a landmark of Brazilian modernism. Through the 11-day program, artists and artworks from across Brazil honor the legacy of Italian-born Bo Bardi, exploring her interaction with Brazilian culture and celebrating Brazilian creativity in all its forms.

"From the modernist project to her embrace of the power of Brazilian popular culture and collaboration with the counterculture, Lina challenged norms and developed ideas that crossed chronological time like arrows and are, today, an essential perspective of Brazilian identity,” says curator Mari Stockler. β€œWith The Square SΓ£o Paulo, we dive into her revolutionary thinking. The event is designed as a dialogue. We provoke time by contrasting Lina’s objects with works by modern and contemporary artists in an exchange between past, present, and possible futures.”

Born in Rome, Bo Bardi moved to Brazil in 1946, and became one of the most important and expressive figures in Brazilian modernism. With a strong emphasis on the social potential of design and architecture, her pioneering projects include the Museu de Arte de SΓ£o Paulo and the leisure center, SESC PompΓ©ia. A keen writer and thinker, she co-founded the influential art magazine Habitat and also created jewelry, costume, furniture, and set designs.

Casa de Vidro was Bo Bardi’s first built project and personal residence until her death in 1992. Completed in 1951, the house has been a meeting point for artists, architects, and intellectuals both during Bo Bardi’s lifetime, and subsequently under the direction of the Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro.

Participating talents in The Square SΓ£o Paulo include Arnaldo Antunes, IbΓ£ Salles, Vivian Caccuri, Luiz Zerbini, Carlito Carvalhosa, Rosana Paulino, AlaΓ­de Costa, Lenora de Barros, Cristiano Lenhardt, Leda Catunda, Ricardo Aleixo, and JoΓ£o Camarero. The event will also feature works by Lygia Pape, HΓ©lio Oiticica, Augusto de Campos, Mestre Guarany, Surubim Feliciano da PaixΓ£o – as well as Bo Bardi’s own work, writings, and original furnishings housed in Casa de Vidro. Four books, based on The Square’s four pathways, are published in a limited-edition boxed set.

The event is curated around four themed pathways related to time, geometry and spirituality, Brazilian counterculture, and the roots of Bossa Nova.

β€œCasa de Vidro is one of my favorite places,” says Matthieu Blazy. β€œIt’s a real inspiration to meet here with artists from across generations, across disciplines, and across Brazil to celebrate Lina Bo Bardi’s legacy and the richness of Brazilian culture. Bottega Veneta is all about timeless style. With The Square SΓ£o Paulo, we recognize how Lina’s ideas and aesthetics resonate to this day, always reminding us of the transformative power of design and culture.”

The Square SΓ£o Paulo opened on May 24th and will be open to the public from May 27th through June 3rd.

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 FΓͺte
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 β€œThe Golden Age: Looking to the Future,” which celebrates β€œa 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 JosΓ© 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 β€œArtpothecary” 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 ClΓ‘sicos 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 beginningβ€”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 β€œfast 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.