malcolm james kutner presents re:construction via curio exhibition. design miami 2018
[ curio ] is design miami/’s newest exhibition platform which invites designers, curators, innovators and gallerists to present cabinets of curiosity throughout the fair. the program spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and emphasizes surprising installations of scientific and technological research alongside handcraft and creative production. the curios are interspersed amongst design miami/’s core galleries, infusing the fair’s exhibition program with inventive snapshots of today’s design landscape.
reconstruction: the action or process of reconstructing or being reconstructed; a thing that has been rebuilt after being damaged or destroyed; an impression, model, or reenactment of a past event.
malcolm james kutner offers designers, artists, and collectors a cabinet of curiosity in which they can rediscover and explore together the interplay of form and function, art and design, abstraction and extraction, intervention and representation across disciplinary boundaries.
re:construction also plays with time and space as it takes an academic approach in creating a transhistorical environment for design-minded prototypes that embraces a selection of works from postwar france to the present-day united states. french reconstruction furniture from rené gabriel, marcel gascoin, and gustave gautier sits alongside ceramic tables made in 2018 in collaboration with kutner and jean-baptiste bouvier. these pieces anchor textiles by bo joseph and laura kaufman, mirrors by maureen fullam and radisay/szarek, and a site-specific intervention by aleksandar duravcevic.
a dynamic collaboration among makers and collectors, this presentation accommodates makers’ preoccupation with creating functional forms and collectors’ fascination with telling aesthetic stories. re:construction not only energizes a cross-disciplinary design dialogue, it also expands our understanding and appreciation of simultaneously formal, intuitive, and malleable relationships.
re:construction is presented by malcolm james kutner with simone joseph, new york, and with special thanks to jean-baptiste bouvier, paris.