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Essentials of Minimalism with Agnes Martin
“When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees, and I thought the grid represented innocence, and I still do… So I painted it, and I’ve been doing it for 30 years.” -Agnes Martin
Agnes Martin’s paintings, abstract and distilled, with their resonant line, shape, and grid, continue to inspire such feelings. “My work is anti-nature”, she once wrote in her essay Untroubled Mind, defining her works as free from suggestion of anything in the real world. Although frequently considered as a kind of bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, Martin seems to equally belong to both, as well as to a place all her own. Her creative process and contributions to the art world during her long-standing career have transcended traditional art historical definitions and left a beautiful legacy.
Martin’s initial body of work was mostly figurative, after her studies for a fine arts masters at Columbia University in the late 1940s, she absorbed principles of Taoist and Zen philosophy that later formed the notions that would lead her artistic development. As Martin was exposed to Abstract Expressionism, which was prominent in the art scene in New York at the time, she destroyed most of her early works and gravitated to abstraction. Martin’s artistic style is a fusion between profoundly beautiful, subjective, and fluctuating human touch, and universal order and symmetry. As she tried to navigate a unique path between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, her creative process was impacted by many prominent names in the art world. When she moved into the Coenties Slip studio in New York, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and James Rosenquist, soon become her neighbours, friends, and influences, and most importantly Ad Reinhardt became a prominent mentor.
Reinhardt specialized in Zen-like philosophies which followed the notions of “no texture, no forms, no design, no colors, no object, no matter”. Martin continued this approach in her framework by combining her fascination towards the principles of Taoism with Reinhardt’s pure “Black Paintings” into her own artistic language. Martin had an extraordinary sensitivity to the subtleties of light and touch. When she hit on the format of the grid—a motif that was tacit in modern painting after Cubism but never before stripped, and kept, so bare—she found ways to make those qualities the exclusive basis of a wholly original, full-bodied art. She insisted that the results did not exclude nature but compared it. The effect of Martin’s art is not an exercise in overarching style but a mode of moment-to-moment being.
Martin, with crucial similarities with artists like Yayoi Kusama, suffered from mental illness and utilised the role of art as a work in process to deal with her ever changing emotions and creative thoughts, which paved the way for her to come in terms with her own visual language. After her own initial vision of the innocent grid, Martin would continue painting grids, and other patterns and forms, over and over again—in fact, that she would do so for the next 30 years.
ELEVEN RISING ARTISTS ON OUR RADAR
Jenny Morgan
B. 1982 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Jenny Morgan’s diaphanous paintings are inhabited by hyper-realistic figures that ebb in and out of focus—sometimes merging into the landscape or diffusing gently into a painterly fog. The artist’s compositions sometimes draw inspiration from medieval painting and historical landscape, using symbolism to expand on the idea of ‘heaven on earth.’ Morgan’s work examines the elemental relationship between human connection, collective power and the natural world.
Jenny Morgan holds a MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and a BA from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver, Colorado. Solo exhibitions of Morgan’s work have taken place in: New York City; London, UK; Colorado; Utah; Indiana; and New Mexico. The artist’s first solo museum exhibition, Skin Deep, took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in Colorado in 2017. Her 2013 solo exhibition How To Find A Ghost was named one of the top 100 fall shows worldwide by Modern Painters.
Alicia Adamerovich
B. 1989 in Pennsylvania, USA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Inspired by the artistic trend of Biomorphism, Alicia Adamerovich’s practice studies the anthropomorphic nature of objects, sensations, and emotions, and highlights their creative potential. Her work takes form from her unconscious, from her interior thoughts and her psychic evolution. The artist divides her body of work into two distinct entities: “diurnal thoughts” and “nocturnal thoughts.”
The artist’s graphite drawings and paintings represent a bridge between the real world and a fictional space. In the manner of her predecessors, like the couple Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, who painted dream landscapes and underwater scenes populated with strange biomorphic forms, Alicia Adamerovich, illustrates a certain tension within a phantasmagorical architecture situated within an infinite horizon. She creates a balance of power between these hybrid organisms stacked upon each other or surging to the front of the pictorial composition. The handmade frames are for Alicia Adamerovich a way of leaving paper behind and exceeding drawing’s limitations in dimension. They reinforce the pictorial composition of the subject and play with hierarchies by conferring upon them the status of icons.
Anthony Cudahy
B. 1989 Florida, USA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Cudahy is a figurative painter whose tender scenes reveal the nuanced complexities of life. In masterful compositions he creates a world for unspoken stories, intimate moments and romantic gesture. Personal and poetic, Cudahy’s figures coalesce with the atmosphere of their environments in fluid brushstrokes.
At once dark and luminous, Cudahy’s paintings often have a phosphorescent quality to them, as though they are lit from within. For the artist, how the paint is handled has its own narrative potential – the thick textures, light airy space, patterning and delicate marks are all active in the story he is creating. Alongside painting, Cudahy makes incredibly detailed colored pencil drawings, in an all-consuming process of mark making. Unlike his paintings which transform throughout the making, the challenging medium calls for the compositions to be decided beforehand.
Brice Guilbert
B. 1979, France. Lives and works in Brussels.
Brice Guilbert’s canvases are heavily built up applications of paint which he makes himself. Guilbert’s paintings—all titled Fournez, the local pronunciation of the Piton de la Fournaise volcano on La Réunion, referencing his Creole roots and upbringing in Reunion Island, off the southern coast of Africa. —use impasto to create the illusion of an erupting volcano. Teetering on the edge of abstraction, Guilbert’s paintings are all created from memory as he attempts to capture his unique experience of the volcanic landscape of his home, using abstraction as a means of engaging with meditative, spiritual and philosophical understandings of nature.
The volcano motif repeated in these works is sculpted by use of a unique process involving heated wax and oil paints. The rigorously crafted surfaces imbue a certain sense of sensuality and laboured intensity. Luminous and layered, they change greatly depending on the position of the viewer. The subtle details and color shifts only expand in richness and fullness when studied more at length and at alternate depths.
Brice Guilbert has shown in multiple exhibitions throughout Europe. Guilbert has mounted solo shows in Brussels, Berlin, and Grenoble and has shown in group shows in New York, Bucharest, Ghent, and beyond. In addition to his painting practice, Guilbert co-founded Island in Brussels, and has published two books. His Creole songs and performances are highly regarded for their poetic and harmonious nature.
Joseph Yaeger
B. 1986, American.
Sourced from screenshots captured across various media – from Olympic competitions to film stills and online newspaper articles – his artworks explore the boundary between sincerity and irony, drama and melodrama, pathos and bathos. Each painting gives a feeling of deja vu, as though distant memories are quickly bubbling to the surface as we look back on our lives.
The subjects of Joseph Yaeger’s paintings are tightly bound to the American artist’s upbringing and are full of references to American popular culture.
Poppy Jones
B. 1985, London. Lives and works in London.
Poppy Jones graduated from the Royal College of Art (MA Fine Art printmaking, 2010). Jones has shown work in solo and group exhibitions including the Bluecoat, Liverpool and Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall. Recent residencies have included KK Museum (Denmark), West Dean (Sussex) and the Horniman Musuem Library (London). Her work has been awarded by the Arts Council, the Alf Dunn Award, The Lynn Painters Stainers Young Artists Award and Falmouth Universities Graduate Pre-incubation award. Since graduating, she has been a Visiting Lecturer at Falmouth university, University of Brighton and currently at West Dean, Sussex.
Poppy’s distinct process of printing results in images which she transposes on to identically sized panes of recycled suede, silk or leather. Distilling familiar sights from the home in unfamiliar close-up – an empty wine glass, a jacket collar, blooming flowers, the shadow from a window – Poppy uses one-off printing and photographic processes to then indelibly imprint these passing moments in time on to surfaces common to clothing. Her work is resonant of Cy Twombly’s polaroids, but with a contemporary aesthetic and a distinctive materiality.
Danielle McKinney
B. 1981 in Montgomery, Alabama. Lives and works in New Jersey.
Danielle Mckinney (b. 1981) creates narrative paintings that often focus on the solitary female protagonist. In these intimate portraits, Mckinney captures the figure immersed in various leisurely pursuits and moments of deep reflection. Engaging with themes of spirituality and self, her paintings uncover hidden narratives and conjure dreamlike spaces, often within the interior domestic sphere.
With a background in photography, Mckinney paints with an acute awareness of the female gaze, employing deeply colorful hues and nuanced details with cinematic effect. Mckinney received her BFA from Atlanta College of Arts and holds an MFA in Photography from Parsons School of design. Her work has most recently been presented in exhibitions at Fortnight Institute, New York; Half Gallery, New York and FLAG Art Foundation, New York. The artist lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.
Eliot Greenwald
B. 1983, Portland, Maine.
Eliot Greenwald is a self taught artist whose work speaks to the absurdity of the human mind. His sculptures are a rejection of reality, and a rebellion against the banal. Skillfully crafted, teetering on hyper-real, Greenwald draws the viewer into his world with a twist of warped and exaggerated illogicality.
In his Night Car series, each work depicts a car in the dark of the night, its headlights beaming and illuminating its travels through strange, uncanny sceneries. Vibrant but simply composed, each piece depicts tall, vacant forests, illuminated by the glow of twin planets. Intentionally portrayed from a third person angle of perception, the disproportionately tall trees and daunting silhouettes lend an eerie mystery and yet a sense of familiarity as it brings to mind the scenes of a night drive. Drawing the viewer into a twisted and warped universe, the exaggerated illogicality of his Night Car scenes reflect Greenwald’s fascination with the absurdity and distortions of the human mind.
Aks Misyuta
B. 1984, United Kingdom.
Filled with biomorphic gestures, flesh and curves, Aks Misyuta’s paintings are populated by seductive characters, mainly women, who lack personal features. Grotesque and cartoonish, the artist describes them as somewhat morphed depiction of the people and moments around her. Inspired by people, indeed, as she defines her working process as a “form of self-portrait”. “The ‘inflatable’ appearance is a way to depict our vulnerable nature – just a momentary pinprick is enough sometimes to destroy,” “So, for me, it’s all about self-cognition and interactions: all the figures, like balloons, are floating in their own pensive universe.”
Aks Misyuta works by intuition and makes no preliminary sketches. She covers the canvas with a single color while waiting to see the “invisible lines” appear. One can notice some recurring objects in her work, such as watches, flowers or mirrors. As concerns watches, they are always accompanied by the title “Time-waster (…)”,thus forming a series of paintings with sensual and pensive postures, a kind of feminist manifesto for the right to waste your time, a commitment to “non-productivity” in the face of the expectations and orders of a traditional patriarchal culture.
Harminder Judge
B. 1982. Lives and works in London.
Harminder’s work has engaged with many subjects but there is a continuous exploration of portals, be it spiritual, political, or personal. His performance work has brought ancient Indian folklore and mysticism into direct contact with bombastic western pop music and live colour field painting; collided occult inspired dreamscapes with hazy laser penetrated reverse baptisms; transported field recordings made in his family’s Gurdwara in Punjab, across the world, replaying them through a speaker system lodged in his throat.
Exploring ideas centred around the universality of condition, tantra, spiritual and cultural cross pollination and the internal and external body, Judge’s work takes the form of performance, video, installation and painting. He has shown in spaces such as The Royal Academy, London; Halle 14 Centre For Contemporary Art, Leipzig; IKON Gallery, Birmingham; CCA Warsaw and The New Art Gallery Walsall.
Raphael Barontini
B. 1984, France. Lives and work in Saint-Denis, France)
Raphaël Barontini’s practice involves bold silkscreens and digital prints that embellish a variety of materials including flags, banners, pennants, curtains, tapestries, capes and more.
His primary medium is painting of which he uses to question the classical codes of the bi-dimensional support. His works are immersive and have been activated by live performances. They are also often installed as standing or suspended objects. The large scenographies enable him to engage the spectrum of classical painting. The subjects, patterns, and archival material draw attention to postcolonial rhetorical questions and criticisms that confront history and emphasize its present-day relevance within large scale streams of information and media.
A Look Into 15 World-Class Art Collections
Contrary to popular belief, not all masterpieces are held in museums and public institutions. Indeed, the majority of the world’s most important works of art are being kept and dealt amongst private collections.
For someone new to the game, the question is always: where do I begin and where do I want to go with this? When collecting art, one should keep one thing in mind at all times: heritage; by acquiring an art piece you are concurrently becoming a custodian of both the artist and their work. Hence, collecting should come personal instinct, and the key is to select the pieces you love, as it is the passion behind the collection what stands out first when others look at it. In the words of Belgian art collector and dealer Axel Vervoordt:
“I have always wanted to live with things that I love and create spaces where I can invite friends and clients into a private world”.
Of course, the rather less noble question of how much will a piece be worth in the future is impossible to escape, but in the contemporary art market, every purchase involves a certain risk, and although bargains do happen often, it is difficult to accurately predict the future market value of a piece. If your main driver is a return on investment, then you should be looking at blue-chip artists, and that involves higher ticket prices. Whatever your goal is, always buy the pieces that speak to you, that way you will never be stuck with art that you don’t feel personally attached to.
Throughout the following list, we unveil the passion behind the pursuit of art collecting through a look into some of the world’s most prestigious collections.
Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch
The Pietzsch’s collection is considered one of the most outstanding private collections of modern art. Started in 1964 by Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, the collection is characterised by two core themes: European Surrealism, and its reception in the US by the Abstract Expressionists. Highlights include paintings by Balthus, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, Sam Francis, Wifredo Lam, René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy or Jackson Pollock. In 2016, the couple decided to gift their $130 million collection to the city of Berlin, making the German capital richer in its art, culture and architectural offering (the building is by architects Herzog & de Meuron).
Bernardo Paz
Paz established himself as a major collector in the 2000s, buying up large-scale works for his art foundation Inhotim, a sprawling 700-acre campus in Brumadinho that mixes contemporary art with various nature preserves and imported flora. After Inhotim opened to the public in 2006, Paz also began commissioning artists to make work. The art complex is known for having pavilions dedicated to commissions by artists including Matthew Barney, Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson, Robert Irwin, David Lamelas, and Chris Burden. Most recently, Inhotim opened a long-awaited pavilion dedicated to Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, underscoring its commitment to creating a dialogue among works by celebrated artists of various nationalities and generations.
Eli and Edythe Broad
With around 2000 works on public view in LA’s The Broad Museum, Eli and Edythe Broad have arguably assembled the best private collection of contemporary art in the world. Valued somewhere around $2.2 billion, the collection includes master pieces by artists such as Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Joseph Beuys and Roy Lichtenstein.
Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky
Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky have long been a championing Latin American art and the need for institutions to take it seriously, making it the focus of their philanthropic endeavours. One way has been by endowing curatorial positions at some of the world’s top art museums, including Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Mr. Brodsky has been a trustee since 2001 and has been the board’s chairman since 2011. The couple also founded Another Space in Chelsea, an arts venue that promotes exhibitions, publications, and research related to Latin American art. Their collection includes a 1944 Picasso portrait of a woman’s head entitled Tête, and works by the likes of Fred Tomaselli, Julio Le Parc or Artur Lescher.
Ingvild Goetz
Founded in 1993 by the collector Ingvild Goetz, the collection now includes more than 5000 works from almost all artistic genres – with the main areas of focus being Arte Povera, American paintings of the 1980s, Young British Artists, media art, photography and works on paper. There are also extensive bodies of work by individual artists, such as Rosemarie Trockel, Thomas Schütte, Mike Kelley and Peter Fischli / David Weiss. Since 1993, the collection can be visited in their exhibition space in Bavaria, housed in a remarkable building by the architects Herzog & de Meuron.
Poju and Anita Zabludowicz
Since the 1990s, Poju and Anita Zabludowicz have been slowly accumulating their 500-artist / 5,000-piece collection of artworks. They exhibit their private art collection at three different locations, primarily at 176, a gallery in North London. Besides organising artist residency programs in Las Vegas, Poju and Anita Zabludowicz plan to open up a privately funded contemporary art museum somewhere down the line.
Adrian Cheng
The Hong Kong businessman is the founder of the K11 Foundation, a non-profit foundation in China that incubates young contemporary artists and promotes public education. Adrian Cheng assembles works and showcases artistic talents from China, facilitating cross-cultural dialogues within the global art scene. His personal collection includes works by Wurm, Elmgreen & Dragset, Katharina Grosse, Zhang Enli, Adrian Wong, Samson Young, and Haegue Yang displayed in attention-grabbing sites throughout the building.
François Pinault
François Pinault possesses an extraordinary collection of almost 2,500 works of modern and contemporary art. With over 30 years of art collecting under his belt, his collection includes works by artists such as of Mark Rothko, Lucio Fontana, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. The Pinault’s collection, valued at around $1.4 billion, is available for public viewing at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
Alexandra and Steve Cohen
Alexandra and Steven A. Cohen began collecting art in 2000. Since that time, they have reportedly spent more than $1 billion on their immense collection, which includes world-class works by Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, and Jackson Pollock, among many others. When it comes to acquiring art, “I am purely from the gut,” Cohen . “And I know right away. If it stays in my brain—let’s say I go see a picture, if I keep thinking about it, I know it’s something I like. If I forget about it, then I know, couldn’t care less.” He is the owner of notable masterpieces including Gauguin’s Bathers or Van Gogh’s Young peasant woman, Munch’s Madonna, and of numerous contemporary artworks such as Willem de Kooning’s Police Gazette and Woman III, one of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility Of Death In the Mind Of Someone Living.
Hubert Neumann
Mr. Neumann’s fascinating collection now includes a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar, a gleaming Mondrian grid, an uncommonly large Klee, one of Matisse’s most enchanting cutouts or a Giacometti bronze of a skinny, angst-ridden dog, to name a few pieces. When asked about why he has never donated paintings to museums he responds: ”I have no interest in institutionalising my paintings. Most museums are sterile places that don’t know how to form collections. They do it by committee, but a great collection has to be idiosyncratic.”
Karen and Christian Boros
Karen and Christian Boros have a reputation for collecting art that many other high-profile collectors are more likely to avoid: from the experimental to the untested. “I like artists that make it difficult for me at first,” Christian, the German advertising maestro, told the New York Times in 2007. “Artists that challenge me, question my conventions and show me something new.” Their collection is housed on a former Nazi bunker in Berlin’s city center, which they purchased in 2003. The venue had played host to raves and sex parties in the 1990s and had “a reputation as the hardest club in the world”. The space open in 2008 and its inaugural exhibition featured work by Olafur Eliasson, Robert Kusmirowski, and Sarah Lucas, among many others. The Boros couple continues to add to their sprawling collection, which includes numerous pieces by Danh Vo, Elizabeth Peyton, Wolfgang Tillmans, and others.
David Geffen
There’s no collection that has a better representation of postwar American art than David Geffen’s, including works by such postwar master artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. His collection is estimated to be worth around $2.3 billion. In 2016 he sold a de Kooning and a Pollock he owned to fellow collector Kenneth C. Griffin for half a billion dollars, and back in 2006 he unloaded two Johns and a de Kooning for $80 million and $63.5 million, respectively. Only a month later, the New York Times reported that Geffen sold Jackson Pollock’s painting No. 5, 1948 (1948) for $140 million to Mexican financier David Martinez. At the time, No. 5, 1948 broke records as the most expensive painting ever sold, overtaking the previous record holder, Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, purchased for $134 million earlier that year by fellow collector Ronald Lauder.
Eugenio López
Eugenio López Alonso, is known as an arts patron whose foundation underwrites contemporary art exhibitions in Mexico, courses in Latin American art at colleges and art schools in the United States, and programs at American museums focusing on the same area. He now owns a 3,000-work collection that includes pieces by Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson, and Gabriel Orozco, some of which are often loaned to exhibitions around the world or on view at the Museo Jumex, a David Chipperfield–designed museum in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City that Lopez opened in 2013.
Beth Rudin DeWoody
Beth Rudin DeWoody began collecting when she was 12 years old. Her focus at the time? Beatles paraphernalia. Since then, her collection has grown to include over 10,000 works by both established and up-and-coming artists. DeWoody opened the Bunker, an art facility in West Palm Beach, in December 2017. The facility, housed in a 1920s Art Deco building that once served as a munitions factory, was inaugurated with a show featuring artists such as Nicole Eisenman, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Nick Cave, and Hank Willis Thomas. The general public shouldn’t expect a glimpse at such treasures anytime soon; the Bunker is open only by invitation.
Dakis Joannou
The Greek Cypriot industrialist’s first art purchase was a Koons piece—a 1985 “Equilibrium Tank,” a basketball seeming to float mid-air. Today, Jouannou still considers it to be his most prized possession. Today, his roughly 1,500-work collection includes pieces by Koons, Ashley Bickerton, Robert Gober, Urs Fischer, Charles Ray, Maurizio Cattelan, and others. Dakis Joannou created his DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in 1982 in Nea Ionia, a northern suburb of Athens. Joannou’s Mediterranian retreat hosts an annual exhibition which has become an event of its own for trotting out some of the art world’s most important denizens.
Designing a Life: Five Mid-Century Modern Icons We Love
Mid-century modern is now part of our lexicon. This singular design movement appears to be the one and only style to resist the unavoidable cycle of trends in art and design. Whether the movement is having a resurgence is no longer a question, it has become transcendental.
The term was first coined by Cara Greenberg to define the American interpretation of Bauhaus and other international styles between 1933 to 1965. Economic prosperity, technological advances and the expansion of cities led to the development of new materials and the need for smaller, more practical furniture. Architects and designers explored unfamiliar textures, forms and colors and experimented with plastic, Lucite, vinyl, glass and plywood. Functionality drove design, making for revolutionary styles that championed simplicity with flaunted clean lines, gentle organic forms and nontraditional materials. These creations became the visual language for a new age; a signifier of progress and a fresh start.
But how is it that mid-century modern designs are as visually compelling today as they were 50 years ago? Though undeniably beautiful, iconic and highly collectible, many of these original pieces were ultimately made to be democratic. Simplicity and functionality made the furniture of this period incredibly accessible, easy to live with and understood by everyone. The designers we idolise today were masters at creating intuitive, universal furniture that has proven to transcend trends.
During this extraordinary time, five players stand out as bastions of mid-century modern. These designers offered some of the most ground breaking ideas in 20th century architecture, and are why this retro style is here to stay.
Richard Neutra
One of the most influential architects of the twentieth century, Richard Neutra helped define modernism in Southern California and around the world. Born in Vienna in 1892, Neutra developed an early interest in architecture, particularly the work of Otto Wagner. World War I interrupted his studies at the Vienna University of Technology. He served for three years in the Balkans, returning to Vienna in 1917 to earn his degree. Neutra’s desire to come to America was sparked by the stories of his mentor Adolph Loos and cemented after seeing Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1911 Wasmuth portfolio.
Neutra experimented constantly. He embraced technology, oddly enough, as a way to connect man with nature. His philosophy of “biorealism” sought to use biological sciences in architecture “so that design exploited, with great sophistication, the realm of the senses and an interconnectedness to nature that he believed fundamental and requisite to human well-being,” as described by architect and Neutra scholar Barbara Lamprecht. His prolific career encompassed iconic residences, innovative schools and multi-family housing, civic and commercial projects around the world, and inspiring city and community plans.
Charles and Ray Eames
In a career that spanned over forty years, husband and wife duo Charles and Ray Eames developed countless ground-breaking pieces of furniture. Cementing their names as figureheads of America’s Mid-century Modern movement, the couple produced a prolific range of designs including the Eames Lounge Chair (1956), DSW Chair (1950) and Eames House (1949) all of which are still to this day heralded for their innovative use of new materials.
Visionaries of design, Charles and Ray Eames produced countless classic pieces of furniture and home accessories, all of which feel as fresh and modern today as they did over four decades ago.
Isamu Noguchi
Isamu Noguchi was one of the twentieth century’s most important and critically acclaimed sculptors. Through a lifetime of artistic experimentation, he created sculptures, gardens, furniture and lighting designs, ceramics, architecture, and set designs. His work, at once subtle and bold, traditional and modern, set a new standard for the reintegration of the arts.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the backlash against Japanese Americans in the United States had a dramatic personal effect on Noguchi, motivating him to become a political activist. Noguchi’s work was not well-known in the United States until 1940, when he completed a large-scale sculpture symbolizing the freedom of the press, which was commissioned in 1938 for the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center, New York City. This was the first of what would eventually become numerous celebrated public works worldwide, ranging from playgrounds to plazas, gardens to fountains, all reflecting his belief in the social significance of sculpture.
Oscar Niemeyer
Oscar Niemeyer is perhaps the most celebrated Brazilian architect, whose flowing designs infused Modernism with a new sensuality and captured the imaginations of generations of architects around the world.
Oscar Niemeyer was among the Modernist architects who defined the postwar architecture of the late 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. He is best known for designing the government buildings of Brasília, a sprawling new capital that became an emblem both of Latin America’s leap into modernity and, later, of the limits of Modernism’s utopian aspirations. His curvaceous, lyrical, hedonistic forms helped shape a distinct national architecture and a modern identity for Brazil that broke with its colonial and baroque past. Yet his influence extended far beyond his country. Even his lesser works were a counterpoint to reductive notions of Modernist architecture as blandly functional.
Le Corbusier
Painter, designer, architect, theorist, and urban planner: Charles-Édouard Jeanneret – better known by his pseudonym Le Corbusier – was one of the most cross-disciplinary and influential figures of the 20th century. He is regarded as a pioneer of modern architecture, a visionary designer of urban utopias for the masses.
In 1917 he moved to Paris and opened an architecture studio with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret as building villas for the elite of the French capital turned out to be the perfect occasion to experiment with innovative architectural solutions driven by the possibilities offered by reinforced concrete. Simultaneously, he developed theoretical schemes, such as the Citrohan house, the immeuble-villas (‘villa apartments’), and the Ville contemporaine (‘contemporary city’), advocating his new concepts of architecture and urban planning in publications whose success reverberated around the globe.
The notoriety achieved from both the writings and architectural accomplishments led to dozen of commissions: the Maison La Roche/Albert Jeanneret (1923–1925), which now houses the Fondation Le Corbusier; the Maison Guiette in Antwerp, Belgium (1926); the Maison Cook; and, most notably, Villa Savoye (1928–1931) in Poissy. Poised on slender concrete pillars in a lush, rural landscape, the modernist icon exemplified the five points of architecture that Le Corbusier had been developing throughout the 1920s, ultimately dictating a new approach to the design of domestic architecture.
Namely, the pilotis (reinforced concrete pillars), the roof terrace, the free design of the ground plan, the ribbon window (running the entire length of the house), and the free façade became the elements of a new vocabulary for a modern architecture filled light, air, and space.
Elaine Sturtevant: The Unsung Hero of Pop Art?
Elaine Sturtevant remains one of the most enigmatic figures of postwar art. Born in 1924 in Ohio, she moved to New York in the early 1960s and became part of the city’s artistic epicenter. In 1964, Sturtevant began to build on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp with her exploration of appropriation. This caused her to start reproducing works of art by memory, focusing on works by her contemporaries such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Sturtevant challenged the accepted canon of twentieth century art with her rigorous appropriations which came at a time when the Abstract Expressionist vision was being replaced by a fascination with mechanical reproduction, mass media and consumerism, concepts which inspired new thinking among Pop artists.
Among Sturtevant’s most celebrated works are her Warhol Flowers, which she began in 1964, the year Warhol created his Flower silkscreen prints and first exhibited them at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Sturtevant’s floral series continued until 1971 and consists of 95 copies of varying sizes. She added a further 19 paintings to the series in 1990. Rather than reimagining the subject, Sturtevant famously used a silkscreen that Warhol had given to her to create further versions of the compositions and to memorise his process. Warhol had himself appropriated a photo by Patricia Caulfield (which appeared in a Kodak advertisement in the June 1964 edition of Modern Photography) by cropping the rectangular image of seven flowers to a square silk screen with four blossoms. However, in Sturtevant’s flower series, her brightly silkscreened hibiscus flowers float over the canvas and were reproduced from memory. Describing her work as “repetitions” as opposed to mere copies, she once said, “the brutal truth of the work is that it is not a copy. The push and shove of the work is the leap from image to concept. The dynamics of the work is that it throws out representation”.
After Sturtevant’s first solo show at the Bianchini Gallery in New York in 1965, critics dismissed her works as meaningless copies which lacked originality. However, Sturtevant’s conceptual investigation of authorship goes beyond that of reproduction into what she termed the “under-structure of art” and the very nature of the image in itself. Sturtevant spent hours studying the techniques these pop artists used to create their process. This encouraged artists to question what is unique about their work and what lay beneath the surface. When Warhol was asked about his own technique, he answered, “I don’t know. Ask Elaine”. Sturtevant’s ambition was to “make reproductions in order to confront, in order to trigger thinking”, thereby leaving room for subjectivity and imagination.
As MoMa Curator Peter Eleey has noted, ‘In Sturtevant’s hands, Warhol’s image draws greater attention to the limits, edges, and qualities of his authorship, already stressed by the appropriated and delegated aspects of his screen-print paintings’ manufacture…while pointing back further to the woman whose image had passed from her own camera, through Kodak’s advertising agency, to a magazine, and then to a high-contrast crop at Warhol’s Factory, before moving to his screen maker, and finally on to Sturtevant’ (Peter Eleey, Sturtevant, Double Trouble, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, 2014, p. 49).
Even though Andy Warhol endorsed and supported Sturtevant’s early career, misinterpretations and criticism caused Sturtevant to stop exhibiting until the 1980s. In 1986, her career revived with her show at White Columns in New York, for which she reproduced works by Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein and Joseph Beuys. Sturtevant’s reinvigoration attracted acclaim which was heightened by the rise of post modernism and other appropriation artists like Sherrie Levine, Mike Bidlo and Richard Prince. The artist later extended her repertoire to contemporaries such as Keith Haring, Anselm Kiefer, Felix Gonzalez – Torres and Robert Gober. Besides painting, Sturtevant kept pace with the changing tides of the avant-garde by mastering other disciplines, notably sculpture, film and photography, as these would enable her to represent the work of her contemporaries more accurately.
In the 2000s Sturtevant’s work was the subject of major retrospectives at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, the Serpentine Galleries, London, and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. Her last show in 2015, “Sturtevant: Double Trouble” at the MoMa reflected her newfound reputation and presented Sturtevant as a catalyst in the exploration of notions of originality, authorship and authenticity.
Artists have always been influenced by their predecessors and contemporaries, yet we do not view this as appropriation. Artists have reinterpreted and translated countless subjects and styles onto their canvases, e.g. Velazquez’s influence on Monet or Picasso. However, in an era of increasing reproduction, Sturtevant’s “repetitions” compel the viewer to look beyond the surface. She remained in constant dialogue with her Warhol Flowers and in 1991, Sturtevant dedicated an entire show to this series. In 2019, the New York Times Style Magazine cited her Warhol Flowers series as one of the “25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age,”
Sturtevant’s recognisable motif, is a loving homage to her predecessor and a symbol of her artistic genius, which contradicts her modest expectations about how her art would be received. As she once said; “to be a great artist is the least interesting thing I can think of.”
Emerging Artists Painting The Ecstasy Of Intimacy
Few subjects inspire artists more than love and intimacy. In our latest list of artists to watch, we shine a light on six emerging painters we love, whose work explores the ecstasy of voyeurism and sexuality through a figurative lens.
Joseph Yaeger
Born in 1986. American.
An artist attuned to the vagaries of contemporary cultural memory, Joseph Yaeger’s practice can be thought of as a parallel investigation in the fetishisation of images in contemporary libidinal economies, and in painting’s contemporaneous agency in the transformation and circulation of the visible.
“The imagery I use is a protracted search to better understand myself; playing or putting on roles that might clarify an interior that is sort of naturally hidden, even from myself. I’ll come across an image––sometimes I’m searching for one, sometimes I stumble into it––and the feeling of it, the arrangement, the subject, the relation of subjects within the image, will sort of jar me, attract me, dislodge me.”
The images appear at first glance immediately recognisable and equally untraceable, an uncanny déjà vu. How Yaeger reacts to the image, a certain “jar” or attraction, perhaps a feeling of loss, jumpstarts the process of turning an image into a panting. The writer Don Delillo’s phrase “There is a world inside the world,” 2 is a guiding principle for the artist. The context of the image dissolves and reveals in the transformation, abstracting the original into copy.
Doron Langberg
Born in 1985. Israeli
An increasingly prominent voice among a new generation of figurative painters, Doron Langberg has gained a reputation for works that, luminous in colour and often large in scale, hinge on a sense of intimacy. Depicting himself, his family, friends, and lovers, Langberg’s paintings celebrate the physicality of touch – in subject matter and process – a closeness that engages with new dialogues around queer sensuality and sexuality. Speaking about his work the artist says, ‘Queerness for me is not just a sexual experience, but a way of being in the world which affects every aspect of my life. Using intense colours and different paint textures and marks to create these everyday scenes, I want to connect with a viewer by speaking to our most basic commonalities – our bodies, our relationships, our interiority – rather than the social categories that may separate us. In creating this connection, I want to make queer pleasure, friendship and intimacy feel expansive and generative, embodying the full range of human experiences.’
Jenna Gribbon
Born in 1978. American
Jenna Gribbon’s paintings draw from memory, art history, and contemporary life. Her syncretic canvases draw on several centuries of painting: figures disporting themselves in a sylvan setting recall Fragonard’s fêtes galantes; an interiors swiftly brushed-on walls evoke the cursory backgrounds of Mary Cassatt; gently distorted architectural features summon the laissez-faire depictions of Karen Kilimnik. Sampling freely from various representational techniques and movements, Jenna Gribbon’s paint handling swerves from the virtuosic to the intentionally slapdash; fast, impressionistic strokes often about minutely illustrated details, highlighting the artist’s interest in collapsing numerous pictorial strategies into a single canvas.
Amanda Wall
Born in 1985. American.
A heady mix of voyeurism, exhibitionism, and 21st century existentialism, Wall’s work exposes the intimate and uncanny. With a shock of lurid colours in contrast to tender flesh tones, Wall’s distinctive palette touches on the nerve of vulnerability, desire and control. The subject matter, however, remains shadowy – a tension between abstraction and distorted reality, a conflict between the self and the void. Often monumental in scale, Wall’s oil paintings explore the ‘limits of intimacy’ in a way that envelops the viewer. Her energetic brushstroke, graphic style, and startling use of colour, paired with the framing of fleshy, often nude or partially clothed bodies reflects a process that is unplanned but guided by a specific emotion or subject, usually originating from personal photographic references. In much of Wall’s artworks, the painting reveals as much as it obscures in terms of meaning. Backgrounds bleed into figures, and limbs and figures are unrealistically twisted and contorted.
Jenny Morgan
Born in 1982. American.
In her portraits, Jenny Morgan paints photorealistic nudes suffused with fantastical colour, distorted by gestural blurs, and sometimes framed by abstracted shapes. Her subjects are most often friends or self-portraits, as having a personal connection with the subject is essential to the artist. Echoing this intimacy, her figures hold eye contact to forge a psychological connection with the viewer. Morgan’s recent portrait series “All We Have is Now” invokes themes of death and rebirth with nods to religious imagery and symbols of mortality. The heady subject matter may seem at odds with the intense colour that suffuses her figures—however, it is the push and pull between darkness and light that interests Morgan.
Nana Wolke
Born in 1994. Slovenian.
Using theatrical props, most notably a red hunting light, Nana Wolke restages both personal and fictional short scenes, but most importantly, glimpses that can no longer be identified as either, lost to the seduction of cultural image and unreliability of one’s own memory.
“The world around us lingers on the brittle line between plastic reality and authentic pretension — Disneyland and Hollywood, Pleasantville and the street you were born on, a fatal crash and a ride in a bumper car. Using a red hunting light, I restage moments that are as likely caught from the corner of my eye as they might be false memories borrowed from cinema and popular culture. Painting allows me to test the vantage point at which images are recalled and recorded, and in turn, realities recreated.”
Claudia Comte
Claudia Comte has her finger on the pulse of contemporary culture and visualizes it beat on impeccably youthful, inclusive, and digitally innovative work.
Her oeuvre is a suspension bridge connecting the natural world of yesteryear and the stimulating and fantastical technologic present. Her sculptures are of natural materials, most prominently wood carved by chainsaw, to render works shockingly smooth and delicate in texture, an intriguing play at the expectation of the materials and the possibilities.
With inspiration rooted in environment, she allows her work to use technology to mine natural phenomena in an artistic way. Referring back to the natural world to see how far we have come, Comte’s work is playful, intellectual and optimistic about the strange and beautiful future ahead.
Comte is Swiss and was raised in the countryside, where her rooted passion for the environment is well suited to her nation’s rich heritage of landscape artists. Comte’s true magic may lay, however, in an aspect of her character that came with adult life in Berlin; her thriving social life. Comte’s work is often highly social, using big installation spaces for viewers to move about and often encouraging viewers to touch the works. Often there is a seriousness around environmentalism that Comte seems to reject. She enables her work to be inclusive and engaging, social and approachable. She invites the viewer to be independent in their exploration of the work and encourages viewers to think critically. She is concerned with the lack of independent thinking in modern society, generations that worship television and gorge over processed media. She seeks to remind viewers of the fun and the enjoyment of being in the moment, being observant and thoughtful of the surroundings, and how only presence creates an experience. Before arriving to her art practice, she studied child educational pedagogy, and this may explain her compassionate and imaginative desire to teach viewers overtly and explicitly, and how she is so easily in tune with youth culture.
She just might be educating us all on how to view the hi-tech future curiously and optimistically while holding close the natural world from which we are still very much a part of.
Comte’s work speaks for itself and tells a different story to everyone. What is more, even her earliest works embedded this idea of engaging with viewers uniquely. In Tornado Kit, 2014, Comte transformed an ice rink in Gstaad, Switzerland into a giant interactive a board game, a simple Swiss game that loosely translates to “move fast, but slowly”. Complete with larger than life pawns modelled after her abstract wooden sculptures and carved of polystyrene, or “Styrofoam”. Her paintings were installed under the ice, showing simple shapes and colors that match what the players roll. Comte often enables a democratic accessibility of interaction in her work, and this is seen vibrant in Tornado Kit, 2014 as the spectrum of players ranged from professional hockey players to local children. Furthering the democracy of her art, the installation NOW I WON, 2017 for Art Basel was stripped of any of the fair’s classic VIP perks or privileges, as a playful carnival with a universal ticket price of a three-franc donation to the Swiss environmental organization Pro Natura. For the exhibition Comte hand carved seven wooden booths, hosting drinking games, arm-wrestling, dance-offs, bowling games, mini-golf, ball-tosses, and darts—using her circular abstract paintings for the targets, and her smallest sculptures to date acting as bowling pins. If it couldn’t get more accessible, the grand prize winners walked away with Comte sculptures made in Carrera marble and valuing between €22,000 [$28,000] and €36,000 [$46,000].
In Curves and Zig Zags, 2017 for Desert X, Comte puts a light hearted interactive spin on the geometric tradition of modern art. Exhibited under the clear sunshine of Palm Springs, California, Curves and Zig Zags, 2017 is a massive free standing structure, tall, thin, and wavy, superimposed with a moiré graphic, a sharp angular geometric composition that gradually morphs into more organic waves. We see these waves and moirés throughout Comte’s work, and not only are they wildly photogenic, the practice is very thoughtful. The waves are organic departures from the stringent shapes of predecessor artists. They are made using technology that is a departure from painterly materials available previously. The works are often superimposed straight onto the wall, rendering immersive experiences very intentionally departing from the experience of the white cube. Morphing Scallops, 2019 filled Gladstone Gallery, NYC with these geometric waves over walls of gradient rainbow. Of the Morphing Scallops, 2019, Gladstone Gallery, NYC in an interview with Office Magazine, Comte explains “I love the idea of using something we know exists but cannot see—like a sound wave. my work is always already incorporating nature’s scientific tools. It intrigues me to make naturally occurring shapes and patterns more visible, more evident”.
Comte’s sculptural work and her installations have only grown more impactful and cohesive. In Copenhagen’s largest hall, Comte exhibited the impeccably gorgeous immersive installation I Have Grown Taller from Standing with Trees, 2019. The carpet is a digitally printed monochrome grid, with rows of 45 six-meter high debarked spruce trees, with some fallen in a pile. In the center of this pale and peaceful forest in a three-meter tall glazed ceramic sculpture. This work in many ways returns to Comte’s roots, of her first and foremost muse, the woods near her childhood home. Comte is often pointing towards the history and function of industrial production and its effect on the environment. The stark bareness of the trees makes them appear struck but some external force, suspended in an entropic state, age apparent in their rings but their futures uncertain as ever. The carpet’s grid adds a sense of natural order, expressing the network of roots and fungi under trees that has been scientifically proven as a way of communicating between trees and sharing nutrients. Yet, under the fallen trees the graphic is concaved and distorted, underlying the off balance of the unseen environment especially. The trees here, however, were sustainably sourced replanted at a ratio of 2:1. Comte invited the audience to touch and mark the trees, creating an intimate moment with the materiality of wood, using her art to create critical engagement on the serious topic.
Last year, Comte partnered with TBA21–Academy, an interdisciplinary arts and science organization, to create an underwater sculpture at Jamaica’s East Portland Fish Sanctuary. Comte’s Underwater Cacti, 2019 emerged from the seafloor unexpectedly. While she worked with ecologically sourced wood endemic to Jamaica for sculptures, she wanted to giveback to the local community and contributed a permanent underwater sculpture, hoping to encourage ecotourism and coral growth. It was the organization’s first underwater installation, and Comte had access to a wide array of experts who provided insight, specifically on water currents and using reinforced concrete, on which coral is known to grow well. The choice of a cacti is also a specific one, as a plant that is synonymous with withstanding dry arid environments, being suddenly placed in a habitat of marine life was shocking, strangely sentimental, yet also futuristic. It hints at adaptation of the natural world and is an optimistic look at what strange possibilities the future could hold. In dialogue with the Underwater Cacti, 2019, her Jamaican wood sculptures are inspired by the shapes of sea sponges, coral, and marine life. An exhibition of this work is planned for 2020 at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.
Throughout her career and use of variety of mediums, Comte has stayed loyal to her sculpture practice. Though wood is her first love, she often utilizes modern technology such as 3D printing to make models of her wooden originals to reproduce in other materials such as marble, bronze, and ceramic. Comte is proud of her fusion of high tech and low-tech methods of producing. She doesn’t see it as a duality but more of an evolution. Marble evolves through time, heat, and pressure. Bronze becomes hard only after being forged as liquid. The material is dependent on the conditions of the it’s environment. In the same way, Comte embraces her high-tech environment and views it as an extension of the natural world. This method expresses her experiential knowledge on both sides of the environmental argument and makes her critics all the more weighed and level.
On view now near a light filled window in a Parisian apartment The White Ceramic Fatty Kenny, 2019 and The White Ceramic Evil Snake, 2019, by Comte are being exhibited as part of What’s Up / Twenty Twenty, a global multivenue exhibition by Lawrence Van Hagen. Both works are made of marble and are in somewhat abstract shapes, juxtaposing the strength of the material to its fragility. The sculptures parallel the Earth’s delicate ecosystems and inspire awareness of how important it is to keep it balanced. It is curatorially fitting, to have these sculptures sitting a top tall, light filled open plinths at the window, with a lush green backdrop of nature.
Comte is the 21st century role model, she strikes the balance of curiosity and contemplation of environmentalism with total grace and impeccable form. She is like her sculptures, inspiring in balance, pure in materiality, and proving of what is possible. Comte doesn’t lead us to the act against climate change with pitchforks; but rather to soothe nature with the man-made technology, finding a synergistic equilibrium to life on Earth. We can’t shame technology for being destructive and we can’t shame nature for not withstanding more. Rather we should invite both to a party, play together, delve deeper than the surface, and arise to occasion that’s been given to us; a world where coral grows on concrete, chainsaws are used with finesse, and sound waves are seen in the desert.
Crafting a Design Collection: Collecting with Purpose and Passion
Design collections often don’t get the same recognition as art collections. They are frequently just seen as furniture or decor, when in reality they hold historical significance and cultural heritage, comparable to great works of art.
Creating a design collection can be a beautiful, lifelong exercise. It is a journey filled with opportunities to explore one’s evolving tastes, connect with meaningful design items, and curate a living narrative that reflects one’s personal story.
When building a design collection it is about curating spaces that are not only visually captivating but also deeply functional and harmonious. Each design object serves as a piece of functional art, seamlessly blending form and utility to enrich the home environment. These pieces are thoughtfully chosen to coexist with existing art collections, creating a dialogue between design and art.
Often, without even being fully aware of it, individuals with a passion for design may already be curating a collection—choosing pieces that speak to them, reflect their taste, or carry personal significance. It’s a subtle process, one that can happen organically, as each chosen piece becomes part of a larger narrative, transforming into a meaningful collection over time. There are no strict rules for collecting design; like art, it is a deeply personal and individualistic pursuit. Sometimes, the allure lies in a celebrated name, a designer who revolutionized their field with groundbreaking creations. At other times, it is a philosophy that draws us in, one that aligns with our values or speaks to our identity. By incorporating these pieces into our homes, we create spaces that not only reflect our aesthetic tastes but also embody a way of life.
Organising your Collection:
The Challenge of Cohesion
One of the most challenging aspects of building a design collection that fits seamlessly into our homes is achieving cohesion. This can be particularly tricky when we are drawn to a wide range of pieces from different eras or styles. The goal is to create harmony, ensuring that the amalgamation of items we love forms a unified narrative rather than feeling disjointed.
Our advice: Establish a unifying theme or palette. Choose a consistent element, such as a color scheme, material, or pattern to act as a thread tying your collection together. This helps different pieces, even from various styles or eras, feel connected and creates a sense of harmony within your home.
The Inspiration Behind Our Choices
Our attraction to design pieces often stems from their shapes, materials, or the eras they represent. Design, much like art, is always in conversation with the past.
Our advice: Research the history and philosophy of the pieces and their makers. This knowledge not only deepens your appreciation but also helps you make informed choices about pieces that resonate with your aesthetic and interests.
Finding Connections Across Styles and Eras
The skill of combining vastly different styles lies in identifying subtle similarities. These might be found in shared materials, complementary forms, or thematic echoes across time.
Our advice: Focus on commonalities like shapes, materials, or themes. Identify shared characteristics, such as similar curves, finishes, or thematic elements like minimalism or nature-inspired motifs. For example, a mid-century modern chair might pair well with an Art Deco table if they both share streamlined forms or complementary materials like walnut and brass.
Exploring the Origins of Design
To truly appreciate design, it’s essential to explore its origins. This goes beyond understanding the creator or studio behind a piece or even the movement or philosophy that inspired it. It involves delving into the historical and cultural context from which the design emerged. Each piece of design carries within it lessons from the past—stories of human progress, social evolution, and technological breakthroughs.
Design is not merely about aesthetics; it is a narrative of innovation. The items we bring into our homes are more than functional or decorative objects—they are statements of what was technologically and creatively possible at the time they were conceived. Whether it’s a chair shaped by the introduction of molded plywood or a lamp influenced by advancements in lighting technology, every piece tells a story of human ingenuity. By understanding this context, we gain a deeper appreciation for design as a reflection of its era and a marker of our collective progress.
Today, for example, the Thonet chair might be dismissed as a generic, mass-produced staple found in nearly every Parisian bistro, but its significance in design history is monumental. In its time, the Thonet chair was one of the most groundbreaking innovations in furniture design. During an era when furniture was predominantly handcrafted—meticulously chiseled, carved, and assembled—the introduction of this chair in the 1850s marked a pivotal moment in both design and manufacturing.
German cabinetmaker Michael Thonet envisioned creating a chair that could be mass-produced and sold at an affordable price. After years of experimentation, he achieved his goal, and in 1859, the No. 14 chair was introduced. By steaming the wood for many hours, they made it soft enough to bend into elegant, fluid shapes. The wood then dried in its new shape, becoming hard and strong.This process was not only efficient but also capable of producing lightweight, durable, and aesthetically appealing pieces at scale. The original No.14 chair is made up of six pieces of wood, ten screws and two nuts. It was the first piece of furniture designed to be shipped in parts to save space during transportation and came with simple instructions to put it together. This approach broke away from the labor-intensive practices of traditional furniture-making, enabling mass production on an unprecedented level. The chair quickly became a sensation, and by 1930, over fifty million units had been sold.
The Thonet chair was more than just a functional piece of furniture; it epitomized the harmonious blend of technology and craftsmanship. With its sleek, minimalist design, it broke away from the ornate, heavy furniture typical of the era, offering a modern aesthetic that was both innovative and accessible to a wider audience. The chair’s appeal extended beyond the general public to designers and architects alike. Among its most famous admirers was the renowned architect and painter Le Corbusier, who used the chair in many of his buildings. Le Corbusier said “never was a better and more elegant design and a more precisely crafted and practical item created.” Its graceful curves have endured over time, and as British designer Jasper Morrison stated, “It has the freshness of a new product, because it has never been bettered.” A piece like the Thonet chair is a reminder that every item in a collection has a story.
Beginning a design collection requires a harmonious blend of curiosity, guidance, and intentionality. Explore pieces that resonate with your personal taste, while remaining open to discovering their history and cultural significance. Most importantly, embrace the process—each piece you select becomes part of your story, transforming your home into a reflection of your journey and growth as a design enthusiast.
CROSS-COLLECTING BEFORE AND NOW
Throughout history, a variety of collecting techniques have been put in place in relation to the time of their creation. The term cross-collecting has been gaining increasing popularity over the 21st century due to its frequent association with renowned art dealers such as Axel Vervoordt and Lawrence Van Hagen, and its growing presence in art fairs such as Masterpiece or Tefaf. Moreover, its financial pragmatism mirrors contemporary investment techniques such as portfolio diversification and hedging.
Nevertheless, what exactly is cross-collecting? The practice of cross-collecting (or cross-buying) can be understood as the notion of collecting artworks across a range of categories. From a contextual point of view, it is a curatorial exercise that makes associations, between objects and artworks from different movements, mediums and time frames, following the taste and vision of the curator. Although it might seem as the term has come to prominence in recent years, cross-collecting is nothing new, indeed this practice has been around since antiquity.
‘Cross-collecting is not just assembling artworks together from different genres but is a contextual well-curated juxtaposition of artefacts that stimulate the imagination.’
The term of cross-collecting is historically recognised from Ancient Roman times up to today. The practice started to flourish during the Renaissance (15th – 16th Century), a historical period known for its cultural expansions and discoveries. Indeed, the collectors of that time were already attesting to the fashion of mingling art from various earlier periods shoulder-to-shoulder with contemporary artworks, rare books and manuscripts into what the “Wunderkammer” (the room of wonders).
However, this collecting practice started to diminish during the 19th century due to the increase of scientific studies of nature. The tendency of categorising objects and artefacts together in groups of chronological periods and genres became popular amongst the public sector, which applied this model to museums and public institutions for educational purposes, categorising each section into clear divisions based on genre, movement and time frame. Consequently, curatorial practices in the 20th centuries were often mirroring this model and collectors were prone on building their collections around one single movement, such as Contemporary Art, Baroque Painting or Old Masters.
In contrast against the isolation of individual art forms, the German concept of the “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art) rose to prominence during the 19th and20th centuries in Germany and Austria. The term was first popularised by the music composer Richard Wagner who argued that “not one rich faculty of the separate arts will remain unused in the “Gesamtkunstwerk” of the future”. The concept meant embracing all the different art disciplines into one creative language through the use of an architectural framework to create the most successful form of creative expression. During the early 20th century, a range of European art movements adhered to the model, such as The Vienna Secession and The Bauhaus.
The Palais Stoclet (1905-1910) in Brussels integrated artists, architects and artisans to create the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk. The UNESCO mansion was envisioned by art collector Adolphe Stoclet and architect Joseph Hoffmann, who worked in collaboration with artists Gustav Klimt and Franz Metzner to create a home where all aspects had to be cohesively designed. The project resulted in a total work of art, and a celebration of sight, sound and taste that paralleled the operas of Richard Wagner, from whom the concept originated.
Although the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk fell out of favour in the post-modern period, it became a core tenet of art history, and today it provides food for thought in imagining what the ultimate home of the cross-collector might look like.
However, is cross-collecting a purely curatorial narrative or is it also a financial pragmatism? In recent years, cross-collecting has gained a strong recognition and validation from art market participants, from collectors to art dealers. Nowadays, the art fairs Tefaf and Masterpiece embrace the term by adapting it into their business models.
The first characteristics of cross-collecting in a commercial environment were first put forward by the Belgian art dealer Axel Vervoordt back in the 1980s. At the time Vervoordt began participating in art fairs, the galleries’ booths were “strongly consistent, boring and very bourgeois” (transcribed by Lindemann from an interview with Axel in the 80s (2010). Vervoordt’s booth stood out by mixing everything from artefacts to artworks and furniture in an intuitive way, reflecting his interests as a collector in an artistic manner in contrast to the static booths surrounding his.
“I consider myself a very eclectic collector and dealer. I treasure the timeless and disdain the trendy. My taste spans centuries, continents and economic strata. I love the tension between different objects and different cultures. And I always let the space I am restoring inspire me.”
Axel Vervoordt.(Etherington-Smith, 2001)
As the trend seeps into the current 21st-century, the contemporary art market was starting to adapt the essence of cross-collecting to its curatorial narrative. Therefore, dealers such as Helly Nahmad or Hauser & Wirth began to model their booths following these principles. Amongst the millennial generation, Lawrence Van Hagen leaves the concept of the empty white cube gallery from the 20th century by curating his What’s Up exhibitions in totally unexpected environments, mixing both art and design pieces from blue-chip to emerging artists from different cultural backgrounds.
Moreover, the practice of cross-collecting could have an affiliation with investment objectives, such as the diversification of a portfolio. Motivating this rationale is the continuous rise of the art market, especially for the contemporary arts.
“Contemporary cross-collecting reflects the increasing crossovers between the financial world and the art market, with the creation of a mixed art collection mirroring the hedge fund portfolio: when one sector is underperforming, others tend to excel.”
David Bellingham (SIA MA Professor)
The beauty and the paradox here is that although cross-collecting began as curatorial practice, the diversified nature of this collecting behaviour leads to financial consideration for investment purposes. So we assume that by placing a blue-chip artwork in dialogue with a piece by a mid-career artist, or, likewise, by placing collectable design pieces next to artworks, the value of the collection as a whole will upsurge for its aesthetic significance and for its diversification. For this reason, cross-collecting could stimulate hedging. Although passionate collectors won’t deny that the essence of cross-collecting is mostly driven by intuitive passion.
Blockchain has the Potential to Improve the Business of Art. Here is How
For the past few years the art world has been experiencing an increasing interest in the many possibilities that the digital sphere has to offer when it comes to the intersection of art and technology.
One of the most thought-provoking conversations that have surged is the one around Blockchain, which has been introduced to the art market as a new ground breaking tool that might tackle some long-standing issues, such as the difficulty of accurately tracing the provenance of an artwork or the challenge to provide an innovative digital infrastructure for sales. Yet, after countless of tedious discourses in conferences and discussions on the topic, are we sure we understand how this technology works?
Blockchain in a Nutshell
Blockchain is a shared, public transaction book that everyone can have access to but which no user has the power to control. It is a database that maintains an ever-growing list of transactional data records, whose security against tampering and revisions is guaranteed by the use of encryption. The word “Blockchain” derives from the structure of the technology itself: as shown in the picture below, indeed, the register is composed of a chain of blocks, each of which contains a certain number of transactions that are validated by the network in a given period of time. Therefore, the usual dynamic server- client has been substituted with a network of computer called peer-to-peer (P2P) whose actions are validated through the consensus layer, a behavioural mechanism that is the base of a specific Blockchain and that all the participants agree to follow in order to guarantee the validity of the inputs of the chain. This means that when a user adds a new transaction or information to the register, the request is transmitted to the network that can validate the action only if it follows the consensus layer of the Blockchain. Doing so, a new block is then chained to the older blocks and so on.
Blockchain and the Art World
The potential of Blockchain technology goes far beyond its current more common use, i.e. as a means of investment in new Cryptocurrencies such as the well known Bitcoin or Ethereum. Many art professionals are trying to understand how to apply this technology within the art world, even if the opinions on the subject are conflicting, especially regarding its real relevance for a company and the structure of the market in which the transactions carried out through this system take place. Nevertheless, a new Blockchain based economy has recently been born and it offers a wide range of services for the art world, from new payment systems to database of information on works of art, from authentication to systems that create a digital report of the provenance of the artworks. Here is how Blockchain Technology has the potential to reshape the business of art.
Certificates of Authenticity
This is where this economy is focusing their efforts, as Blockchain allows you to create incorruptible authenticity certificates that follow the work of art since its creation, reducing also the possibility of fraud. Currently, however, this possibility is interesting mainly in the case of digital art, where problems concerning the intellectual property and copyrights are more difficult to manage. For instance, a problem encountered in the digital art market is the relative ease of replication and copying, which leads to a substantial reduction in the value of these works, discouraging collectors from purchasing. Blockchain could help solve this problem by releasing a limited number of copies, which are linked to unique blocks that prove ownership. In 2015, Verisart was the first art & tech company to explore this field, working closely with artists such as AiWeiwei and Philip Colbert to certify the authenticity of their works since their inception. At the end of the last year, the company had raised $2.5 million in seed financing, and the CEO and Co-Founder Robert Norton affirmed that:
“The art world is quickly realising that Blockchain provides a new standard in provenance and record keeping and we’re looking forward to extending these services to the industry”.
R.N.
Through platforms like Verisart, the certificates of authentication can be easily produced in just a few steps and then they are encrypted in their Blockchain-based decentralised digital ledger. Therefore, artists themselves can authenticate their work and then the authentication is permanently recorded on the Blockchain register, which leads us to the next point: provenance.
Provenance
Even if issues with authentication certificates can seemingly be dismissed by this new technology for new artworks being created in the present, it is possible to argue that for non-contemporary artworks, where an accurate provenance is even more needed, the system might not be as effective. The main reason is that assessing the attribution of an Old Master painting is not always a straight forward process and the attribution might change overtime with further research. Such a case would create an issue in the history of the provenance of a painting, as the nature of Blockchain does not allow later amendments if the information has already been chained in the protocol. One of the leading companies in the field is Codex Protocol, founded by Jess Houlgrave and Mark Lurie in 2017. The system is an open source and it functions as a digital and secured register for the history of the ownership of artworks and collectibles. Obviously, they are aware that the attribution of an Old Master painting might change overtime, and they believe that registering these information is equally important in order to have a complete picture of the history of the artwork. According to Jess Houlgrave:
“By bringing trust and efficiency to the ecosystem, Codex Protocol will ensure more buyers acquire the objects they desire, more sellers receive a fair value for their items, and more intermediaries grow their revenue”.
J.H.
Shared Ownership
Another interesting application of Blockchain technology for the art world relates to the field of investments, in particular of the so called shared ownership, which is the new age competitor of the more traditional art funds. Unlike the later, new Blockchain based companies have devised a model whereby the investor can purchase a share of an artwork, and its ownership is therefore divided among several “shareholders”. Therefore, the technology can lead to a more accessible online marketplace by converting millions of dollars worth of an artwork into smaller digitalised financial units, which can be easily bought and sold at a fraction of the total cost. For the first time, technology could allow investors and collectors to exchange shares of paintings and sculptures in real time, in the same way as in the stock market, forming an online art investment fund model based on a decentralised technology. The downside effect is the missed aesthetics appreciation of the artwork itself, which is therefore reduced to an abstract entity that is used merely for trade purposes. Maecenas is the first market place of this kind, and it was founded in 2017 by Marcelo Garcia Casil, and its aim is to democratise the art investment dividing incredible masterpieces in shares that can be bought and trade through the platform. One year after its inception, Maecenas had successfully tokenised the work “14 Small Electric Chairs (1980)” by Andy Warhol, raising $1.5 million for 31,5% of the artwork. According to its founder:
“This is a historical moment, for us and for the Blockchain community. We have achieved a significant milestone that marks the beginning of a new era. Tokenisation of assets is the most prominent and exciting use case of Blockchain technology”.
M.G.C.
Innovations in Blockchain are certainly contributing to a digital transformation of the art market, however many questions are still unanswered and the social nature of the art world and the relationship with art dealers and specialists seems hard, if not totally impossible to replace.
