Hasta La Ideas

Contemporary artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have turned five galleries at the V&A museum in London into the apartment of a fictional architect for an exhibition that opens next month.

The V&A invited Elmgreen & Dragset to develop an installation for its former textile galleries, which have been closed to the public for several years.

The artists appropriated over 100 objects from the museum’s collections and combined them with their own artworks and antique market purchases to create a mock up of a domestic interior.

“Making this exhibition is like creating a detailed set for a film, but with access to the incredible collections of the V&A to choose from,” said the artists. “While selecting objects to furnish the apartment we began to envision pieces of dialogue between characters that we could imagine might inhabit the space.”

To accompany the set design, Elmgreen & Dragset have written a script that describes the lifestyle of the disillusioned retired architect who inhabits the space.

Visitors will be given a copy of the script and invited to wander through the rooms, interacting with character’s furniture and possessions so they can better understand the societal issues of ageing, disappointment and alienation that inspired the story.

“We are excited to be working with two of the world’s leading contemporary artists on this ambitious project,” said V&A director Martin Roth. “The result will be unsettling and provoking and above all will present the V&A’s collections in a radically new and memorable way for our visitors.”

The exhibition opens to the public on 1 October 2013 and will continue until 2 January 2014.

Elmgreen & Dragset are known for their subversive sculptures and installations, which draw on diverse influences including social politics, performance and architecture. Previous installations by the duo include a sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse on top of the vacant fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square and a full scale replica of a Prada boutique built in the Texan desert.

For the London Design Festival, the V&A is currently showing a set design depicting a dinner party in progress by designers Scholten & Baijings, an installation of 5000 paper windmills that fills an enormous doorway, and a colourful chandelier that descends from the ceiling of its main hall.

Recent exhibitions at the V&A include an overview of fashion influenced by London’s clubbing scene of the 1980s and an exhibition dedicated to David Bowie memorabilia.

See more stories about the V&A »
See more exhibitions »

Photography is by Stephen White, courtesy of the artists and Victoria Miro, London © Elmgreen & Dragset.

Here’s some more information from the V&A:

Tomorrow – Elmgreen & Dragset at the V&A In partnership with AlixPartners 1 October 2013 – 2 January 2014

The V&A has commissioned a major site-specific installation over five galleries by leading contemporary artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. Opening in October 2013, Tomorrow will transform the V&A’s former textile galleries into an apartment belonging to a fictional, elderly and disillusioned architect.

The installation will feature over 100 objects from the V&A’s collections, which will sit alongside works by the artists, as well as items sourced from antique markets. The juxtaposition of objects, which will be arranged as a grand domestic interior, will create ambiguity and raise questions about cultural heritage. Martin Roth, V&A Director, said: “We are excited to be working with two of the world’s leading contemporary artists on this ambitious project. The result will be unsettling and provoking and above all will present the V&A’s collections in a radically new and memorable way for our visitors.”

Elmgreen & Dragset’s exhibition Tomorrow will appear like a set for an unrealised film. To accompany it, the artists have written a script, which will be available to visitors as a printed book. The drama centres on a retired architect who had great vision but very little success in his professional life. In his twilight years, and with the family fortune long gone, he is forced to sell his inherited home and all his possessions. The script comments on issues of ageing, disappointment and alienation in today’s society.

Within the domestic setting, visitors will act as uninvited guests, able to curl up in the architect’s bed, recline on his sofa, or rifle through books placed by the artists to hint at the imagined events that could have taken place here.

Tomorrow will examine interests that have abided throughout the artists’ careers – those of redefining the way in which art is presented and experienced, issues around social models and how spaces and objects both inflict on and reflect our behavioural patterns. Such ideas are visible in many of the artist duo’s previous exhibitions, including The Welfare Show at Serpentine Gallery in 2006, The Collectors at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and The One and The Many at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 2011.

Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset said: “On one of our early visits to the V&A to discuss the show, we encountered the former textile galleries which were being used for storage and closed to the public. When we found these spaces we knew right away what we wanted to do. Making this exhibition is like creating a detailed set for a film, but with access to the incredible collections of the V&A to choose from. While selecting objects to furnish the apartment we began to envision pieces of dialogue between characters that we could imagine might inhabit the space. So we wrote a script. It was sort of a reversed process where the props in our film set initiated the narrative. Now it’s our hope that visitors will interact freely with this set and discover their own clues as to who our fictional and quite eccentric inhabitant might be.”

Elmgreen & Dragset have worked closely with V&A curator Louise Shannon to research and select objects from the V&A collections.

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at the V&A appeared first on Dezeen.

Le Conarte a fait appel à l’agence mexicaine Anagrama pour créer un espace de lecture pour les enfants au sein d’un entrepôt, situé dans un ancien site industriel. Le résultat est une plateforme ultra design et multi-fonction surplombée par des luminaires aux formes asymétriques et colorées. Un projet superbe à découvrir.

London, Paris, Milan and New York are usually the first cities that come to mind as the breeding grounds of art and culture. Yet it’s in Antwerp, Belgium (with a population of around 500,000), where the ); return…

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Far Away is Close at Hand in Images of Elsewhere, a new exhibition by artist Stanley Donwood, opens at The Outsiders gallery in Soho, London next Friday.

Donwood is perhaps best known for his work with Radiohead and Thom Yorke – he has created the artwork for Radiohead’s albums stretching back to OK Computer, as well as for all of Yorke’s solo projects. This show will feature paintings created for The King of Limbs, Radiohead’s 2011 album, as well as ink and pencil pieces Donwood made for Holloway, a book published by Faber and Faber earlier this year. Alongside these will be new works, such as Nether, shown above.

Blackdown Cloud

Vaporised Wait

Vaporised Holloway

The Holloways series includes woodcut prints and large works on paper. Holloway lanes are characterised by an over-arching avenue of fauna that creates a natural tunnel effect. “In the lead up to making these pieces I became fascinated with the idea of a cathedral of sound,” says Donwood. “I was working with Radiohead on the record that was to become The King of Limbs, and my early hearings of the music seemed to suggest an over-arching canopy of detail.

“I had a kind of memory that the fluted columns and ceiling tracery of medieval churches owed its inspiration to the northern forests of Europe; the tall tree trunks, the interlaced branches above, the majesty of the woods. I wanted to take this caged spirit of the trees back into the forests, where sounds were free and untethered by religion, where the spreading branches supported the sky, not the roof of a church. I began to paint trees, bright, coloured trees, through which dark mists could percolate.”

While working on the Holloway book, Donwood slept overnight under some of the canopies in south Dorset, most of which have since been cut down. He then drew the canopies from memory back at his studio.

Friday Woods

Hurt Hill

The two paintings above were featured as part of The Kings of Limbs artwork. For the show, Donwood has decided to frame all the works in ash wood. “The ash is Yggdrasil, central to pre-Christian Norse mythology, which I alluded to in the artwork for The King of Limbs,” he says. “The ash tree is currently under dire threat from a disease called, imaginatively enough, ash die-back.”

Of the show’s title, he says: “It’s a very beautiful sentence to my mind, suggesting both positive and negative sentiments; in fact, it’s a very sentimental expression. And this exhibition is also, maybe, my most sentimental yet. Give me a few more years and I’ll be painting fluffy puppies or something.”

The exhibition at The Outsiders will run from September 20 until October 19, more info on the gallery is at theoutsiders.net. Stanley Donwood also posts new projects and general musings to his blog, slowlydownward.com.

Everything’s coming up sunflowers for the Van Gogh Museum, which has discovered a new painting by (you guessed it!) Vincent van Gogh. The Amsterdam institution, which reopened in May after a seven-month renovation, revealed “Sunset at Montmajour” (1888, pictured) in all its luminously impastoed glory at a press conference held yesterday.

“A discovery of this magnitude has never before occurred in the history of the Van Gogh Museum,” said director Axel Rüger, who described the painting as a transitional work in Van Gogh’s oeuvre. “Moreover, a large painting from a period that is considered by many to be the culmination of his artistic achievement, his period in Arles in the south of France. During this time he also painted world-famous works, such as ‘Sunflowers,’ ‘The Yellow House,’ and ‘The Bedroom.’” The attribution of the work, long stored in an attic and thought to be a fake, is based on research into style, technique, paint, canvas, the depiction, Van Gogh’s letters, and the provenance, according to Rüger. “Sunset at Montmajour” will be on exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum beginning September 24.

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