The Nigerian designer who returned to Lagos after training in Europe is one of the key interpreters of the local creative scene. A firm believer of the special practical intelligence of Africa, he strives to enhance all things local, from culture to production techniques.
A US artist, Lola Montes set up her atelier in Sicily a few years ago. We met her to listen to her life story on the other side of the Atlantic and to better understand her artistic ceramic and painted art.
“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town”. In this short phrase, presumed to have been written in the late 19th century, Lev Tolstoj sums up a timeless and universal law: stories, all stories, whether personal or collective, begin with movement, a journey to somewhere or an arrival from somewhere. All in all, a border crossing.
In the new Fenix Museum in Rotterdam, designed by MAD Architects, the inaugural exhibition All Directions narrates migration as a personal and collective experience through six fundamental themes. We talked with the curator Hanneke Mantel.
Visiting the exhibition at Palazzo Reale, the artist Giampaolo Bertozzi came across the works of Galileo Chini, one of his Masters and a role model for Italian and international ceramic arts.
One, ten, eighty càntirs: the traditional terracotta jug with two mouths, famous for its ability to cool liquids and an emblem of the typical conviviality of Barcelona, is the focus of a series of artistic works. The curator Júlia Esqué tells us all about it.
In the northern French region scarred also physically by mining activities, the local antenna of the famous museum went “20,000 leagues below the earth”, investigating the artists’ relationship with the real and imagined universes hidden beneath our feet.
In the Twenties, aesthetic codes borrowed from the avant-garde movements and technical progress went hand in hand to develop a new decorative language: stylised geometric patterns that immediately spoke to a wide audience. A dynamic and treasured expertise handed down by design.
Art Deco was already waning in the early Thirties. This was the time when applied decorative arts made way for industrial design. The language of objects abandons decoration to become synthetic, intuitive, immediate. The extraordinary series of red earthenware vases concluding the exhibition ‘Art Déco. Il trionfo della modernità’ at Palazzo Reale bears witness to this.
A meeting with the author of “Il giardino di notte” to investigate his very personal use of rare earths and light.