DESIGN HIGH

The Louise Blouin Foundation is delighted to announce its partnership with Carpenters Workshop Gallery, one of the world's leading design art dealers, in a collaborative exhibition that will feature several of the most important and innovative artists in the field of contemporary design art. Design High will specifically address the tensions that exist between craft and fine art among some of the most innovative established and emerging artists in the field, including Marc Quinn, Pablo Reinoso, Thierry Dreyfus, Vincent Dubourg and Sebastian Brajkovic. Working in an idiom that does not preclude a purpose beyond formalist or subjective aims, design art is both celebrated and dismissed for embracing some form of functionality or usefulness. Design High will be on view at the Louise Blouin Foundation, 3 Olaf Street, Holland Park. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, 24 June from 6.30 to 11.00 pm.

Design High will focus specifically on the fine, and perhaps illusory, line between art and craft. In addition to pieces by some of the most established names in design art like Marc Quinn and Thierry Dreyfus, the show will feature up-and-coming proponents of the genre that blur and manipulate the line between formalism and functionality. Sebastian Brajkovic, a celebrated young artist whose works subvert the recognizable forms of historical styles of furniture into surreal and dysfunctional sculpture, will be represented, along with Vincent Dubourg, another artist who uses traditional and found objects, weaving into them the most elemental forms from nature: branches of trees blend with cases, bureaus, chairs, or even a staircase, giving both Nature and the objects a new identity and a new functionality. Other artists like Ingrid Donat work with more traditionally identifiable objects, but Donat casts these in bronze to create pieces of sculptural monumentality. Still others, like Marc Quinn revel in the tactile qualities of glacially-smooth Carrara marble, glass and metal, creating ostensibly functional objects that simultaneously feel far removed from the practical and the everyday.

The vast scale and "blank-canvas" quality of the Louise Blouin Foundation's galleries serve as a springboard for the artists' creative processes. Several works exhibited in Design High have been created in direct response to the monumental scale and dramatic and varied light of the gallery spaces at the Foundation. Design High will also complement design offerings at Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum happening concurrently this summer.

Design High will be complimented by a series of educational events which form part of the ongoing Louise Blouin Foundation Education, Science and Creativity Programme. Panel discussions, lectures and workshops will explore the ties and tensions that exist between form and function in design art. Workshops will be led by the participating artists. Leading academics, curators and critics will deliver talks and discussions which explore themes related to current views on design as an art form, the market for design and the future of functional art in an international market.

About the Artists

ATELIER VAN LIESHOUT AVL's creative team produces practical, uncomplicated and substantial works of art which permit an element of what they describe as the "absence of design. These new works exploit common industrial materials such as galvanized steel tubing used in scaffold construction and sheets of unfinished plywood combined with their trademark preference for brightly coloured polyester. AVL designs furniture to satisfy a self sufficient and independent lifestyle in the same spirit of the company's own ideological tenets realised in their miniature models of "Slave Cities" fashioned into lamps, chairs and tables.

SEBASTIAN BRAJKOVIC After completing a course in cabinet-making at school, Brajkovic applied to both the Rietveld Academie and Design Academy Eindhoven, being torn between a fine arts or design education. He eventually chose the Design Academy with a view to make art that wanted to be design and design that was art. Brajkovic studied under Gijs Bakker, Hella Jongerius and Jurgen Bey. He also continued his studies in philosophy at Utrecht University and carried out an invaluable internship at Jurgen Bey's studio. In June 2006 Brajkovic graduated with the "Lathe Chairs" and "Home Grown" projects and has already made a name for himself as a brilliant young design artist.

INGRID DONAT Paris-born Ingrid Donat learned the art of sculpture from design to construction, casting, engraving and painting from Sylvia Berndt, the companion of Andre Arbus. For the past twenty years Donat has been creating a body of work that she only began to exhibit publicly in 1998. Donat engraves bronzes, painted upholstery and treated wood. The artist is inspired by the bold colours and forms of tribal art, the elegance and simplicity of Art Deco and the organic and natural motifs of Art Nouveau.

THIERRY DREYFUS Dreyfus is one of the leading lights of design art. He first came to prominence as a lighting designer for the stage, working at the Strasbourg Opera in the 1980s. His career quickly expanded into fashion show lighting for some of the greatest fashion houses, including Yves Saint-Laurent, Christian Dior and Helmut Lang. Since 1989 Dreyfus has had an ongoing collaboration with the designer Ann Demeulemeester. Alongside his work for the catwalk and the opera house, Dreyfus has created a spectacular body of lighting projects, from the domestic to monumental public projects. For Design High, the dramatic scale of the Louise Blouin Foundation's entrance gallery has served as the inspiration for a site-specific light installation.

DRIFT Design studio DRIFT was founded by Ralph Nauta (1978) and Lonneke Gordijn (1980), both graduates from Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands (2005). With a shared passion for watching human behaviour, DRIFT designs products, projects and concepts for interior and public spaces. Nauta is an expert in many crafts, materials and production techniques. Gordijn has a fantastic sense for shape and conceptualisation. Together they combine knowledge and intuition, nature and science fiction, ideology and reality.

VINCENT DUBOURG The French designer, Vincent Dubourg, works in Paris and the small town of Creuse, where his atelier is located. Dubourg's latest work challenges traditional notions of contemporary furniture design by embracing an openness towards found and natural materials. His unique pieces evoke a sense of the familiar and deliberately defy categorization as design or art. Dubourg describes his pieces as a fusion of furniture, architecture and sculpture, where he strikes a careful balance between the practical and the beautiful. Dubourg uses traditional furniture making techniques such as glass blowing, wood-bending, and metal casting as a means of transforming simple materials and found objects. His distinct style is at once nostalgic and avant-garde.

MARC QUINN Marc Quinn's wide-ranging oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual. Using an uncompromising array of materials, from ice and blood to glass, marble or lead, Quinn develops these paradoxes into experimental, conceptual works of art.

PABLO REINOSO Pablo Reinoso has practiced the art of sculpture since he was a teenager. A French-Argentine artist and designer, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1955, Reinoso has lived and worked in Paris since 1979. For many years Reinoso has worked with wood, slate, marble, brass, and steel, adapting his creations to a variety of materials.

rANDOM INTERNATIONAL rAndom international is a London-based collective set up in 2002 by Stuart Wood, Flo Ortkrass and Hannes Koch. Their work explores the conflict between reinterpreting the "cold" nature of digital and the often hands-on approach of analogue. To achieve this rANDON INTERNATIONAL starts by searching and exploring the relationship between science, art and design. Most of the work is interactive, fuelled by an intense curiosity applied to experimental processes.

LIONEL SCOCCIMARO Like much current art, that of Lionel Scoccimaro generally displays a very smooth and accomplished technique, resulting from the use of industrial resins, lacquers and processes. This type of treatment, in which the artist's "formal psychology" appears at first sight to have left few traces, aims at a certain efficacy that suggests immediate comprehension. This legible lexicon of symbols belies the complexity of Scoccimaro's multi-layered messages.

ROBERT STADLER Viennese-born Stadler studied design in Milan and then at ENSCI/Les Ateliers in Paris. Stadler's work often attempts to scramble the usual categories of art and design by questioning the status of the object as work of art or product, addressing qualities of preciousness and lowliness, elegance and vulgarity and seriousness and absurdity.

DESIGN HIGH
Presented by Louise Blouin Foundation in collaboration with Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Künstler: Atelier van Lieshout, Sebastian Brajkovic, Ingrid Donat, Thierry Dreyfus, Drift , Vincent Dubourg, Marc Quinn, Pablo Reinoso, Random International , Lionel Scoccimaro, Robert Stadler