Marcel Duchamp – DesignApplause

visionary barrier-breaking chicago designer virgil abloh dies at age 41.

Nov 29, 2021

above> mca chicago’s virgil abloh 2019 retrospective “figures of speech”

social media best informs us of visibility and reach and virgil abloh‘s passing gave us a pretty clear picture of who he touched. he reached dizzying levels of cultural success in a dizzying short timespan. with engineering and architectural degrees, within a decade he created two fashion brands, pyrex vision and off-white, whose market was youth, hip-hop, “the street”, and grew to interning at luxury fashion pillars fendi to becoming the artistic director of louis vuitton.

in july 2021, lvmh, vuitton’s parent company, announced its acquisition of the off-white trademark in a landmark deal that gave abloh an unprecedented new role working across lvmh’s vast portfolio. though he started creating fashion he also dabbled with graphics with jay-z and kanye west and products via ikea, nike, mercedes-benz, and rimowa. but without question his biggest statement was the runway.

he also liked “words”, “isms”, a lot of quotation marks. he liked the word “readymade,” a term coined in 1915 by marcel duchamp, the french-american artist best known for taking found objects (most famously, a standard-issue urinal) and re-contextualizing them as art, which abloh interprets as a way to birth new ideas with recognizable parts.

his approach juxtaposes hip-hop and the omnesiac culture of the internet, where the past is impossible to forget; always just a few clicks away and open to constant referencing. “it’s called hip-hop, it’s called sampling. you take a record and you make this new format of music from these adjacencies,” he explains. “we don’t exist devoid of the artists and thinkers that came before us: mies van der rohe, rem koolhaas, kanye west, pharell, caravaggio. they give us soil,” he continues. “it’s dangerous when you start naming yourself as the oracle.”

this approach is illustrated by what he calls the “3 percent approach,” the notion that you only need to edit something three percent to make it seem at once familiar and completely new, a winning proposition for abloh. “you notice a lot in my work the referencing or taking a thought and adding a component,” he explains. “duchamp is my favorite. duchamp is my lawyer.”

he is described as a visionary, trailblazer, cross-generationist, rule breaker, and genre-bender. he gets compared to karl lagerfield.

abloh was often quoted saying that everything that he did was for the “17-year-old version of myself.” “i would sort of agree i’m not a designer; that term seems like it’s for traditionalists,” he says. “tbd the new title.”

on tuesday, 30 november 2021, he was expected to present a louis vuitton runway show in miami ahead of art basel to mark the opening of a dedicated men’s store. vuitton will present the show in his honor.

above> photography by delfino sisto

above/below> 2019 mca chicago – “figures of speech” offers an unprecedented survey of abloh’s creative work over nearly two decades and pulls back the curtain on his process. in the exhibition, prototypes are presented alongside finished artworks, product designs, and fashion to reveal his myriad inspirations – from centuries-old painting to commonplace signage at construction sites. running throughout the exhibition is an emphasis on dialogue, which abloh creates through his inventive use of language and quotation marks, turning the objects he designs and the people who wear his clothing into “figures of speech.” editor’s note: the takeaway from this installation – this guy is indeed special.

[ mca figures of speech ]

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above/below> louis vuitton chicago flagship showroom during george floyd 2020 summer protests // million dollar glasses

above/below> 2021 mercedes-benz project gelandewagen unveiled – artistic, track-spec g-wagen with full race car cabin. the project that bears the name ‘geländewagen’ was supported by gorden wagener, the brand’s design director, in which despite being a conceptual creation that simulates a racing version, all the details of the suv were carefully thought out. abloh, in a statement to mercedes-benz, sees his contribution as a sculpture that meets the profile and habits of those who consume the brand and that is ready to hit the art market.

above> 2018 / off – white little black dress

above> 2018 / abloh’s first louis vuitton mens’s spring-summer 2019 collection

above> his final louis vuitton collection // editor’s video note: hip-hop befits vuitton indeed

Artist urs fischer on objects.

Apr 29, 2012

click > enlarge

Even though last week our focus was on Milan, there are, in fact, other things happening in Italy. In Venice Urs Fischer’s new exhibition “Madame Fisscher” opened at Palazzo Grassi. This show, like his others, is all about objects. Here’s what he had to say about that:

“Everybody likes objects; everybody likes different objects. It comes down to what objects you want to put in your art. [Jeff] Koons and [Claes] Oldenburg both seem to have their agendas with their objects. So do I, I guess. I like them all: high, low, used, new, whichever works. I don’t know if the Lamp/Bear has anything more to do with Koons or Oldenburg than all three of us and everyone else have to do with [Marcel] Duchamp’s liberation of the real thing. Before him, it seems objects appeared in, or maybe as, still-lives. Duchamp’s the guy, the legend, who liberated objects from being second-class citizens. Even if his greatness lies in our imagination and how he built himself to make us imagine his work as we imagine it. His objects are often not very satisfying to spend time with outside of the fictions he created for them.”

[ madame fisscher: 15 april > 15 july ]

about perrin drumm

Trees by andrea branzi. Carpenters workshop gallery.

Mar 1, 2012

click > enlarge

When birch tree forests are pruned or agricultural cultivations of fruit trees are picked, they are dispersed or burned. I have always been fascinated by these parts of nature, that continue to give off a grand expressive force, more powerful when they are combined with modern, perfect and industrial materials. They become mysterious, always diverse, unique, unrepeatable and somewhat sacred presences.
Trees, trunks and branches are part of our ancient culture but also of actual culture, because in the age of globalization, design searches to trace recognizable ‘anthropologoical’ platforms.
The collection, ‘Trees’ consists to place simple, everyday objects, books, and images next to the strange presence of branches and trunks, like in the reality of the world.

Andrea Branzi

In a short time, Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Paris has already treated us to a regular and rich demonstration of Design Art: in March Andrea Branzi will be given space to express himself as a free and committed thinker with this new collection « Trees ».

In a space that was once the Galerie de France, a place where contemporary art flourished, Catherine Thieck will come back to pose a few objects from her own collection on the shelves of Andrea Branzi. Works by Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Méret Oppenheim and Rebecca Horn will fill the shelves of an artist whose personality and preoccupations have remained consistently at the avant-garde of the architecture and design world.

The Italian architect and designer Andrea Branzi, born in 1938, was ahead of his time in Florence in 1966 when he set up Archizoom associati, the first, internationally renowned avant-garde group. In order to define this remarkable character, one must use the vocabulary of projects: theoretical research, new design, experimental laboratory, leeway, mass creativity, new organization… He also he coordinates and curates exhibitions, he regularly exhibits his personal work , publishes manifestos, teaches generations of students and participates in conferences all over the world.

« Trees » represents a continuation of his thinking on architecture. He creates a minimalist space of shelves, veritable pieces of micro-architecture made from aluminum that spread out in neo-plastic bursts like a Mondrian. However, through the splits in the frame, Andrea Branzi introduces trunks and twigs gathered in the wild. This strange encounter that began in the eighties with « Animali domestici », questions the duality of the nature-culture relationship. With « Trees », he adds a dimension, an extra slice of soul, as nature becomes art.

opening: saturday 10 march 4 > 9pm
exhibition: andrea branzi | trees
exhibition dates: 10 march > 16 may 2012
venue: carpenters workshop gallery | rue de la Verrerie, marais, 75004, paris | t / +33 (0)1 42 78 80 92
[ carpenters workshop gallery ]