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Apartment, Furnished by Hilt With Antiques, Art, Personal Memorabilia, and New Works Was a Bona Fide Hit of Milan.
Antoine Billore transported truckloads of antiques – and his original furniture collection – from Paris for L’Appartement, a trade fair presented in collaboration with L’Artisan Parfumeur. Photos: Theo Bobin
Almost universally agreed to be the best show in Milan, Parisian antiques dealer Antoine Billore has transformed an empty corner garden space at Città Studi into L’Appartement, a much-loved flat filled with antiques and art he trucked in from Paris. There were also personal memorabilia and his original furniture collection – almost all for sale. The display was beautiful, but also hearty: Amongst all the family photos and childhood souvenirs, like a porcelain Babar plate showing Billore’s birthday. Even Billore’s pieces, which dress old decorative elements in new clothes, were saturated with a love of survival: solid wooden chairs combined with vintage upcycled panels or bas-reliefs; screens that include small pieces of art; solid oak lamps inlaid with 18th-century details; and more. “The idea was to create something new using outdated, forgotten, and neglected materials,” said Billore. “I don’t have a feeling of longing for the past; what I’m interested in is creating new work, changing the way we look at old things.”
Billore’s lack of adherence to his findings was to the benefit of every Salon-goer; several people left with exhibits, including the American gallery director who snatched the carved wooden bowls from the kitchen and Jill, who carried the painting to New York. The exhibition was accompanied by L’Artisan Parfumeur, celebrating its 50th anniversary, and the scent adds something mysterious and magical to the environment. Future show creators, take note.
Natalia Triantafylli and Andrew Pierce Scott Are at the Top of Their Game
New ceramic and metal furniture by Natalia Triantafylli and Andrew Pierce Scott was the highlight of Alcova’s Baggio Military Hospital. Photos: Tim Salisbury
London-based ceramist Natalia Triantafylli and artist/metalworker Andrew Pierce Scott have been working together for years, but their room at Alcova – which saw them create vintage furniture – was their clearest collaboration to date. A sideboard with a metal frame with lacy elilac flowers, a “blue” “green” ceramic bench, a magazine/wooden holder that could be at home in a castle as it were in a Brooklyn apartment: At the same time, rough and delicate, these are things that announce their production method, seams and all. Scott grinds and welds recycled sheet metal into black and waxed frames and volumes, while Triantafylli creates motifs in decorative stoneware and psychedelic translucent porcelain. A true collaboration where the talents of individual and notable designers are combined into something even bigger – in the ocean that exists, that furniture is made, a clear and authentic visual language that is undoubtedly theirs.
From the Uppercut Gallery in Antwerp, Two Exhibitions Reflecting on the Domestic Space
Above: Soft Baroque’s Ghost Kitchen for Uppercut; down; LS Gomma’s temporary Painting At Home exhibition, also from the Antwerp gallery
In 1926, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen for a German public housing project, creating what is now considered the first fixed, built-in kitchen. It was a new system that has created a monster of memorization, at least in the opinion of Nicholas Gardner and Saša Štucin of Soft Baroque. As something of an antidote came Ghost Kitchen, a subterranean Soft Baroque installation in Milan, presented by Antwerp’s Uppercut Gallery. The Ghost Kitchen turned the kitchen area into a laboratory of unusual proportions: there were high-tech items given an archaic feel, such as three chairs made of Tufnol, a plastic apron that can be sanded to look like wood, and everyday items that have become a little Gothic, such as laminate cabinets carved with spidly floral motifs aspible text up. BBQ pit.
Ghost Kitchen was one of two presentations in Milan from Uppercut, which also unveiled Painting at Home, a solo exhibition of new pieces by Milan’s LS Gomma. Using his signature polyurethane rubber embedded in metal, the designer explored the possibilities of his materials, transforming them by hand into shiny and delicately crafted bowls and “paintings”. His exhibition, which took place in his apartment, was only open for 24 hours before it was closed by his landlords – enough time to cement it on our list of the best.
Bronzed Pasta, Pearl Buttons — Oxilia Gallery Group Exhibition Delights in Small Details
The white cube has its place, but this year, the Oxilia Gallery of Milan looked in the other direction, creating a deep space with Room Studies #1 – a wood-paneled interior where objects and materials relate in subtle unexpected ways. Matthew Verdon has produced lighting that uses renewable, plant-based materials such as hemp and bamboo, while Kutarq Studio’s Totem de Luz uses a dual-pull system that allows the light source to move from ambient to focal. Beatrice Dettori reimagined the forms of cast iron, and Arianna Lelli Mami’s clay vessels were anthropomorphized. The cabinets of the Barocco series by Ludovico Grantaliano, based on the golden ratio, had the cool sheen of sheet metal yet exuded a kind of warmth, encrusted with pearls and other precious stones. Chris Fusaro has transformed pasta (!) – by casting lost wax – into copper and bronze household art. (Our favorite piece, a green chair made of carved rigatoni, sadly didn’t make the photo.)
Along with pieces by 14 designers, the exhibition also featured items from the personal collection of Oxilia Alessandro Mensi: Lia chairs by Claudio Salocchi, Barca table by Piero de Martini by Cassina, two works by Man Ray, and a wood sculpture by Manlio Argenti. A small, off-the-beaten-track show that felt doubly rewarding for being almost hidden.
This exhibition casts Polish Design in a new light, combining the historical and the contemporary
A look at Polish Modernism, featuring vintage designs alongside modern ones by the likes of Maria Jeglinska and Marek Bimer. Photos: Michał Łukasik
WithPolish Modernism: The Struggle for Beauty– presented last week by the Wisteria Foundation, at the top of Milan’s 1950s BBPR-designed skyscraper Torre Velasca – curators Federica Sala and Anna Maga made a case for modernism specific to the country of Eastern Europe: a movement of the 20th century in which the decorative arts remained central and even an expression of cultural resistance. As Katarzyna Jordan, president and founder of the Wisteria Foundation, puts it: “We don’t show physical beauty, but rather a way of thinking. [that] combined art, industry, and the responsibility of everyday life. ” What made this exhibition even more important is the exhibition design of Zofia Wyganowska Studio, who created the exhibition space with white stucco, marble, and polished black plaster that was intended to combine the aesthetic language of the Polish modern era with the aesthetic language of Torre Velasca itself.
The exhibition showed the lasting effects that modern ideas continue to have on Polish architecture, with works from the archives of the National Museum in Warsaw, including furniture by Jan Kurzątkowski, Bohdan Lachert, and Teresa Kruszewska. These are placed in dialogue with pieces by contemporary designers such as Mati Sipiora, Marek Bimer, Aleksandra Hyz, Monika Patuszyńska, and Małgorzata Markiewicz. Additionally, Tomek Rygalik, Maria Jeglińska-Adamczewska, Paweł Olszczyński, Igor Polasiak and Maja Ganszyniec were commissioned to create objects for the exhibition. After Milan, the exhibition moves to the headquarters of the Wisteria Foundation in Warsaw.