DESIGN AND INTERIOR SCULPTURES PART 2

What happens when a work of art also presents a functional purpose, when a sculpture serves as a piece of furniture, when a picture is painted, not on canvas, but on a curtain or carpet?
This exhibition puts into perspective the way in which many artists eschew categories and question the porous boundary that is meant to separate fine art from the decorative arts by reintroducing the notion of domesticity in their reflection.
These works often considered as belonging in the margins of artistic practice reveal other stakes, however. The most obvious of these consists in attributing to the object a function that goes beyond beauty or content.
Throughout the twentieth century, the question of the closeness or distance between fine art and the decorative arts has been hotly debated, just as, for that matter, the potential ‘decorative’ virtues of the work of art.
For their part, designers stress this possible permeability between furniture and sculpture by creating pieces whose functionality vanishes behind form, and/or by increasingly producing limited series, and sometimes even unique pieces.
Today the presumed barrier between what allegedly falls under art and what has long been considered a minor art is gradually fading away.
This change in perspective has been brought about by artists that have rekindled the dialogue between form and function by introducing in their practice materials that are generally used in the creation of domestic objects or craftwork.
In its diversity, the exhibition offers a contemporary outlook on creation in the broadest sense of the term.
It also plays freely with the idea of a domestic installation that has more to do with the apartment of an amateur than the white cube that is the gallery.