Museum Shows/ April
Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bard Graduate Center
April 4th – August 11th 2013/ New York, NY USA
A little-known but remarkable collection entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a gift of J. Pierpont Morgan and is on display at the Bard Graduate Center. It features more than 200 objects of primarily medieval art and French eighteenth-century paneling, furniture, metalwork, textiles, painting and sculpture, as well as late nineteenth-century art pottery. The exhibition also provides the first comprehensive examination of Georges Hoerntschel, an enterprising and successful decorator during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Kaj Franck – Teema with Variations
Design Museum Denmark
April 4th – December 30th 2013/ Copenhagen, Denmark
The Design Museum Denmark celebrates a fellow Scandinavian Kaj Franck, a Finnish designer that brought beauty to the post-war times in Finland and afar. His simple, beautiful and functional designs quickly became popular household items. The exhibition explores his life’s work between unique and mass production, between the artistic and industrial, with a comprehensive theme emerging.
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Ai Weiwei: According to What?
Indianapolis Museum of Art
April 5th – July 21st 2013/ Indianapolis, IN USA
A major retrospective of Ai Weiwei lands in Indianapolis this month featuring over 30 works spanning more than 20 years. The artist is known for his broad spectrum of practice, represented here with sculpture, photography, video, site-specific architectural installations as well as the design for the Beijing National Stadium, on which Ai consulted for Herzog & de Meuron. The exhibition also includes a new sculpture made from steel rebar that was salvaged from schools that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
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Stephen Prina: As He Remembered It
LACMA
April 7th – August 4th 2013/ Los Angeles, CA USA
Stephen Prina was walking down La Brea Avenue in the 1980s when he saw a bright pink fitted unit by architect R.M. Schindler. The desk had been taken out of its original context and was displayed as a freestanding object in the street. Inspired, Prina chose two houses built by Schindler in the early 1940s that had since been demolished, and used surviving plans and photographs to make copies of the unit furniture that Schindler designed to be arranged to follow the lines of the room. Prina did the same with his copies and installed the twenty-eight objects in a grid pattern for LACMA.
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Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990
The Getty
April 9th – July 21st 2013/ Los Angeles, CA USA
The Getty celebrates its Los Angeles home as its newest exhibition provides an engaging view of the area’s urban landscape, examining everything from its freeway network to corporate towers and modern steel and glass residences. Drawings, photographs, models, films, animations, oral histories and other design ephemera help illustrate LA’s role in cutting-edge design and modern architecture from 1940-1990.
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Richard Hollis
ECAL
April 24th – May 17th 2013/ Lausanne, Switzerland
First shown at Design Miami/ Basel 2013 exhibitor Gallery Libby Sellers, Richard Hollis travels to ECAL for display in the institution’s Gallery l’elac. The exhibition features more than 200 items from Richard Hollis’ own archive and serves as a timeline for the designer’s professional life, with travels mid-century travels to Cuba, Zurich and Paris, founding a new school in 1964 and his role in the design of radical politics in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec: Momentané
Les Arts Décoratifs
April 26th – September 1st 2013/ Paris, France
The Nave of Les Arts Décoratifs is dedicated to a retrospective on the work of French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, beginning at their career’s conception to their lastest work. The scenography of the exhibition highlights the duo’s research into partitioning space with their sleeping cabins, sofa and lightweight screens. It covers research over the past fifteen years, all set beneath an enormous textile vault.
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Dior, Balmain, Saint Laurent: Elegance and Ease
Mint Museum
April 27th 2013 – January 12th 2014/ Charlotte, NC USA
At the beginning of the 20th century, three French designers were born and eventually became known among the greatest names in fashion. Christian Dior established Paris as the center of the world for haute couture; Pierre Balmain created fine, slim silhouettes for his tailored suits; and Yves Saint Laurent was among the first to present ready-to-wear designs, including his famous tuxedo suits for women. The Mint Museum explores the fashion of these three top Parisian designers with selections from its fashion collection.
