“Here Comes The Sun!” at Galerie BSL
Galerie BSL’s Design Miami/ exhibition imagines a nautical Miami Beach paradise, complete with white sand, a cabana, and design objects resembling flora and fauna. Designed by Emilie Bonaventure of Be-Attitude, the booth embraces the theme “Here Comes The Sun!” and explores dichotomies of art and design, tradition and innovation, sculpture and function. The objects come from a diverse group of artists and designers, many of whom have created exclusive, unique designs for the gallery.
Jewelry artist Taher Chemirik creates luxurious nature-inspired furnishings. After 20 years of collaboration with major fashion houses—including Hermès, Chanel, and Yves Saint Laurent, among others—Chemirik extends his flamboyant-yet-refined aesthetic into his “Interior Treasures.” Each piece, handmade in Paris in fine brass, copper, wood, and rare hard stones, has the delicacy of a small piece of jewelry, transformed to a grand scale. Pushing the boundary between sculpture and furniture, Chemirik’s Carnivore Floor Lamp is a tangle of brass vines and tendrils with three agate light fixtures, and his equally animated, undulating Mystic Garden Screen opens to 180 degrees like a wall of gleaming petals.
A 2009 Nominee for Designer of the Future at Design Miami/ Basel, Nacho Carbonell is a widely collected Spanish designer showing unique pieces for Galeries BSL from his “Time is a Treasure” collection. In his many-legged clock creatures, Carbonell uses slices of blue agate with circles cut out of them that were discarded by French jewelry houses, who used the circles of agate to make clocks. Carbonell says of his own clocks: “In the end the stones gave me the idea of what they wanted to be. Their frustration fuelled their desire. By imagining my own clocks, I wanted to reinstate them with what had been taken from them.” Carbonell also shows his Giant Luciferase Floor Lamp resembling a large glowing sea anemone.
Charlotte Cornaton also presents a unique selection for the gallery, from her collection of Chakra sculptures, small ceramic and glass sculptures and single-stem vases that resemble natural crystals. The spiritual works each refer to a specific crystal and chakra; for example, the yellow-green piece is the sulfur and Anahata chakra for the heart.
Tel Aviv-based artist Ayala Serfaty creates exquisite, ethereal light sculptures that also resemble nature. To create these “Soma” works, Serfaty imports hand-blown Italian glass and works the forms with a flame and polymers in her studio, making each piece entirely unique and original. Intriguingly ambiguous and amorphous, the sculptural lights resemble luminous ocean creatures or vegetation.
British designer Faye Toogood, known for her set productions for Comme des Garçons, Tom Dixon, and Alexander McQueen, presents her exclusive collection “Caged Elements,” a line of modern, elegant furniture using gilt cages as their basis. Her constructivist designs employ English walnut, brass-plated steel mesh and precious stones in simple, geometric forms. Her strikingly minimal vocabulary and fine materials make for bold, stylish, and functional furniture.
Ceramist Djim Berger is dedicated to porcelain; he explains, “the goal of my work is to open the spectrum of porcelain. I experience it, make it take risks, I combine it to find new forms, colours or techniques. I want to help it reveal its true potential; bring porcelain where it has never been before.” Through his alchemistic investigations, Berger has developed a technique of mixing polystyrene with the traditionally delicate ceramic medium to create functional and lightweight stools and benches. His pastel-colored cylindrical furniture is at once playful and austere, with intricate surface designs resembling porous stones or sponges.
On view at Galerie BSL, Design Miami/ 2013, Booth G04, Dec. 4th-8th.
Explore Galerie BSL and Design Miami/ on Artsy.
