Eliska Design

Gibbs Farm is an unusual setting for a sculpture collection. The North Auckland property is dominated by the Kaipara Harbour, the largest harbour in the Southern hemisphere. The harbour is so vast it occupies the whole western horizon; and it is very shallow, so when the tide goes out, the shallows are exposed for several kilometres and the light shimmies and bounces off it across the land. Equally, it is the forecourt to the prevailing westerly weather that sweeps, sometimes vehemently, across the land. Everything in the property flows towards and eventually into the sea; and every work contends in some way with the slide seaward.

The flow of the land, the immense body of water, the wide harbour flats and the assertive variety of the elements have all imposed themselves on the artists. Gibbs acknowledges that “the challenge for the artists is the scale of the landscape; it scares them initially” and demands something more from them. Walking the land visitors can appreciate how each artist has come to terms in their own way with the gravitational pull that is exerted on everything as the mountains roll into hills and slide into gullies and slope down towards the wide flat expanse of the Kaipara harbour.

More than 100 of the world’s leading photo galleries headed to Somerset House in London for fourth edition of Photo London. The 2018 fair took place between 17 – 20 May.

The fourth edition of the fair included 108 galleries from 18 different countries, including Italy, Japan, the UK, the USA, Switzerland, China, Denmark and more. Selected by an expert Curatorial Committee, 2018 saw the first time a host of “special” projects are to be included in the fair.

An installation on “1968” is to be presented by Olivier Castaing / School Gallery in Paris, while a major exhibition on the legacy of William Henry Fox Talbot, considered to be the inventor of photography, will be curated by Hans P. Kraus Jr (New York). The exhibition feautured vintage prints alongside contemporary artworks by Adam Fuss, Cornelia Parker, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Mike Robinson and Ver Lutter. A solo show by Darren Almond was shown by White Cube (London).

The Discovery section of Photo London was introduced in 2017. In 2018 it will be curated for the second time by Art Consultant and Curator Tristan Lund and has been significantly expanded for this year’s show. The 22 galleries feature in Discovery include a range of artists from London, plus international galleries from The Hague, Munich, Geneva, Tokyo, Mexico City and Beijing.Each year a “Master of Photography” is selected – this year, the accolade goes to Canadian fine art photographer Edward Burtynsky. As part of this year’s programme, Burtynsky will present a special exhibition of new and rarely-seen work including a preview of his latest project Anthropocene. He’ll also present a newly developed Augmented Reality (AR) experience.

Burtynsky also gave a talk as part of the Photo London Talks Programme, whilst other speakers include Joel Meyerowitz, Cornelia Parker, Susan Lipper, Bruce Gilden and Vera Lutter.

Prominent British galleries will also be displaying shows. Guy Bourdin’s personal Polaroids will be presented by the Louise Alexander Gallery, while the Atlas Gallery will be showing new work by the Dusseldorf school photographer Andreas Gefeller from his Blank series, a new museum portfolio by British photographer Chris Simpson and previously unseen work by Jimmy Nelson.

Puebla, Mexico is a dazzling Spanish colonial city with rich and beautiful architecture from the Baroque era.  To celebrate this rich history, the city has commissioned The International Museum of the Baroque situated on the outskirts of the historic centre.  The Museum has reinvigorated the city, which was on the brink of economic crisis.

The Museum was opened in February 2016 and designed by Japanese architect Toyoo Itō.  The Museum’s design is a contemporary reimagining of the Baroque, inspired by the ethics and aesthetics at the heat of this historic cultural movement.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Baroque permeated political and economic systems and transformed the conception of nature through innovations in thinking, creating, viewing, and lifestyle.

The Baroque is also an aesthetic understanding of contemporary existence. It’s a sensibility that allowed for a revolution in thought and creativity, which is revealed again in the eyes of philosophers, artists, and intellectuals through their various modes of expression: visual arts, fashion, literature, advertising, mass communication, economy, tourism, and science among others

The museum’s delicate white exterior walls catch the eye from miles away. They look like sheets of paper stood on end and precariously assembled. Doubled by the surrounding reflecting pools, the walls, when seen up close, aren’t fragile at all but are made of 14-inch-thick cast concrete.

The enormous cultural patrimony of Puebla and Mexico serve as the focus to describe this key period in world history and the principles of the Baroque aesthetic, as well as its impact on all spheres of European and Latin American society in the 17th and 18th centuries.  For a century and a half, the style pervaded nearly all artistic disciplines and aspects of transatlantic culture, a strange, frantic expression of the newfound contact between two hemispheres that would profoundly change the lives of people on both sides of the ocean. In Mexico, the Baroque left its most indelible mark on the colonial city of Puebla.

Silver and gold extracted from Spain’s colonies were flowing to the Far East and to Europe, where the Roman Catholic Church had responded to Martin Luther’s threat by building temples of worship that bombarded the senses with excessive decoration and copious amount of gold. They reminded all who entered of the awesome power the church wielded. This intimidation tactic is on full display throughout the Americas, including in several remarkable Baroque churches that still stand in Puebla.

The content of the Museo Internacional del Barroco is the result of planning the best way to approach the subject and to transmit its messages to visitors through the very languages of the Baroque to convey direction, coherence, and identity to the elements of the exhibition design, the didactic content, and state-of-the-art audiovisuals.

Maybe it’s not surprising that there aren’t many museums devoted to the Baroque, the artistic and architectural style that’s been described as “clumsy in form and extravagant in contorted ornamentation” and whose name may derive from the Spanish word for “wart.” Even little-b “baroque” can be synonymous with having bad taste.

And yet, the Baroque is also Don Quixote, Descartes, Rubens, Rembrandt, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Isaac Newton, Shakespeare. 

“We try to break and dissolve the cold and rigid order to achieve fluid spaces,” the architects wrote in a statement timed to the museum’s unveiling last year. “We hope that when people move from one room to another, they experience a Baroque space.”

Ito, who won architecture’s Pritzker Prize in 2013, designed the building to be earthquake-resistant, a feature that was put to the test (and passed) when a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck less than 100 miles away in September. Inside, a sweeping curved staircase is bathed in sunlight streaming in through a vast glass wall that looks out on a central courtyard.

“In Baroque art, light symbolises a revelation from God opposing the darkness of ambivalence,” the architects wrote. “In this project, light also acquires a special meaning.”

A recording of choral music welcomes us as we enter the galleries, setting the tone for the journey to come, which can take several hours if you let it. A timeline written on one wall explains that the Baroque lasted roughly from 1598 to 1752, capturing a moment when Western Europe was beginning to grapple with changes including the conquest of the Americas and the Protestant Reformation.

One gallery is filled with a room-size scale model of the city’s centro historico, where visitors could touch a button that lit up the location of this or that Baroque structure, including the intricately tiled Casa de Alfeñique and the Church of Santo Domingo. We had a chance to visit the latter, which contains the gold-dipped Capilla del Rosario (Rosary Chapel), a shining (literally) example of Mexican Baroque with acres of gold leaf coating its every surface. The museum’s auditorium also provides a virtual tour of the chapel, along with other famous Baroque churches around the world, on its four video screens.

Wall texts explained that the Baroque aimed to spark awe in the viewer. Drama, exaggerated emotion, theatricality and sensuality were core elements of the style, which also took on a local dimension in Mexico, the Philippines and Italy. In Cholula, one of Puebla’s nearby suburbs, the eye-popping Church of Santa María Tonantzintla features cherubs with distinctly indigenous features, carved into every last inch of the church’s stucco interior.

Another gallery demonstrated the interest that upper-class Europeans developed in the “exotic” cultures they were increasingly hearing about from merchants and explorers. They started collecting artifacts and animal specimens to display in their lavish homes. One installation recreated such a collection room, complete with “cabinets of wonders”, taxidermied birds, animal tusks and furniture from faraway lands.

Luther Lashmit’s touch can be seen in the buildings he designed throughout Winston-Salem.  

In 1927, Lashmit joined Winston-Salem architectural firm Northup & O’Brien (now CJMW Architecture) and became the lead designer for Graylyn at age 29. The sprawling mansion is reminiscent of something seen in the French countryside, featuring 60 rooms spread across 46,000 square feet. It stands today as the second-largest private residence ever built in N.C. (behind only Biltmore).

The Gray family traveled in Europe and sent telegrams to Lashmit while he was designing Graylyn. “Had dinner in a Scottish Castle,” they wrote. “Bought the dining room. Please incorporate in your work.” A few weeks later, crates would arrive with paneling and chandeliers.

Selfridges has embraced its radical alter-ego in The Flipside, a side-stepping new exhibition aiming to define contemporary – and future – concepts of ‘radical luxury’. Housed a few steps from the department store’s storied, bright-white Accessories Hall, which was overhauled last year, is The Old Selfridges Hotel, a concrete maze of darkened rooms, activated by luxury technology, fashion and fragrance houses into a disorientating dystopia.

The Flipside takes notes from the Accessories Hall and turns them on their head. An antithesis of the Hall’s clean-cut aesthetic, with its half-moon shaped bar and distinctive, calming orb lighting, The Flipside employs high gloss black flooring, a multitude of mirrors, and neon strips that puncture the darkness.

British artist Cedric Morris (1889 – 1982) was the only person of his generation to achieve national stature both as a painter and a plantsman. To celebrate Morris, two concurrent exhibitions will constitute the first major reassessment of Morris on over 30 years. These exhibitions, entitled Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman and Cedric Morris: Beyond the Garden Wall are being held at the Garden Museum and Philip Mould & Company gallery in Pall Mall respectively.

Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman is the first museum show of Morris’ work in over 30 years, and shows how two disciplines, of art and botany, intertwined to form one of the most remarkable artistic lives of the 20th century. As well as painting portraits, still-lifes and landscapes representing his expansive travels, Morris is best known for his flower paintings, which reveal his keen interest as a botanist – he cultivated over 90 new irises – and the exhibition at the Garden Museum will focus on these horticultural works that took flower painting out of the taxonomic sphere, into an expressionist mode with echoes of surrealism and cubism. 

This major exhibition is the first to examine the relationship between four ground-breaking Victorian artists: Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–79), Lewis Carroll (1832–98), Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822–65) and Oscar Rejlander (1813–75). 

Drawn from public and private collections internationally, the exhibition features some of the most breath-taking images in photographic history. Influenced by historical painting and frequently associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the four artists formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography.

The idea of ‘art photography’ is nearly as old as photography itself, for in the 1850s photographers began to claim fine-art status for their work. Debates about photography and its role raged internationally, but it was in England, through the work of Oscar Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll and Clementina Hawarden in particular, that the new art form found its fullest expression.

These four artists – a Swedish émigré with a mysterious past, a middle-aged Ceylonese expatriate, an Oxford academic and writer of fantasy literature, and a Scottish countess – formed the most unlikely of schools. Both Carroll and Cameron studied under Rejlander briefly, and maintained a lasting association based around intersecting approaches to portraiture and narrative. Influenced by historical painting and working in close association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography.

Separately, Rejlander, Cameron, Carroll and Hawarden produced some of the most spectacular images in history. Although each developed their own distinctive style, even now their works are occasionally mistaken as they knew and photographed many of the same people, were attracted to similar themes and adopted many of the same compositional strategies. The pictures they made are among the most beautiful, provocative and inviting of their time, but more importantly they mark the birth of an idea that we now recognise as among the greatest and most enduring of nineteenth-century visual culture.

The ubiquitous photographs of children – particularly preferred by the gallery’s Patron, the Duchess of Cambridge, who has written the foreword to the catalogue and selected certain images for a Patron’s Trail – pose a question about purity, and perhaps also a question about latency. Children were in the process of becoming (many of them here, photographed over time, age before our eyes) and so was photography. But the Victorian idea of them as innocent seems especially misguided on the basis of Carroll’s grumpy Edith Liddell (1858), or his fuming Irene MacDonald (1863), who brandishes a weapon-like hairbrush with bristles in sharper focus than any of her own features. Over 150 years later, the children have got their own back, asserting for a modern audience their rage at being caught in the camera.

A new exhibition opening at the Victoria and Albert museum will present an extraordinary collection of personal artefacts and clothing belonging to the iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Locked away for 50 years after her death, this collection has never before been exhibited outside Mexico.

Clothes, jewellery, makeup and a defiantly red-leather-booted prosthetic leg belonging to Frida Kahlo, which were sealed in her house for more than 50 years, are to be shown at the V&A in London, the first time they will have been seen outside Mexico.

More than 200 items from the Blue House, the home of Kahlo and her muralist husband, Diego Rivera, on the outskirts of Mexico City, are on exhibit.

After Kahlo died in 1954, aged 47, Rivera locked up her belongings in a room and said it should not be opened until after his death. In the event, it was not opened until 2004, revealing a fascinating treasure trove of clothes, makeup, jewellery, medicines and other intimate possessions.

The show will explore how the artist empowered herself through her art, clothes and style after a difficult early life. Aged 18, she was involved in a near-fatal bus crash that left her in pain and incapacitated for long periods.

While other women were plucking their eyebrows and wearing the latest fashions, Kahlo carefully choreographed her distinctive appearance and style.

The V&A show will include 22 of the colourful and often paint-splashed Tehuana garments she wore, visible in the hundreds of photographs that exist of her and the numerous self-portraits. There is also one of her ebony eyebrow pencils that she used to emphasise her monobrow; and her favourite lipstick: Everything’s Rosy by Revlon.

Of course, everything was not rosy in Kahlo’s life but she tried to make it so. The London show will include plaster corsets she had to wear to support her back and which she individualised by decorating them with paintings. One features a hammer and sickle, reflecting her communist views, and a foetus, presumably because she was unable to have children.

This week we explored the Philip Mould Gallery portrait miniatures exhibition, which showcased over thirty significant examples from a distinguished European Collection.

The exhibition also includes works by John Smart, the finest miniaturist in 18th century Britain.

To coincide, the gallery organised a talk with Céline Cachaud, a specialist in 16th- and 17th-century portrait miniatures. Céline's talk explored the Framing of Limnings in Renaissance Paris and London.

Céline’s lecture provided a rare and fascinating insight into the challenges and approaches adopted by craftsmen and artists during a period of fervent miniature production.

I also enjoyed learning more about significant miniaturist’s from the period, including Nicholas Hilliard, who was Queen Elizabeth I master painter and was known for his keepsake miniature production. A few examples above, include his Man in roses, a portrait of Mary Stuart, and an unknown man in a flamed background.  As he was a trained jeweller, he surrounded the paintings in extraordinary bejewelled encasements.

Below are a few examples of the miniatures which formed the Philip and Co. exhibition.

 Hayward Gallery has presented the first major UK retrospective of the work of acclaimed German photographer Andreas Gursky. Known for his large-scale, often spectacular pictures that portray emblematic sites and scenes of the global economy and contemporary life, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant photographers of our time.Driven by an interest and insight into ‘the way that the world is constituted’, as well as what he describes as ‘the pure joy of seeing’, Gursky makes photographs that are not just depictions of places or situations, but reflections on the nature of image-making and the limits of human perception. Often taken from a high vantage point, these images make use of a ‘democratic’ perspective that gives equal importance to all elements of his highly detailed scenes.

Building of the week is the Kapel De Waterhond (The Waterdog) in the town of Sint-Truiden in Belgium. It combines three of our loves: reuse of old structures, minimalist design and fabulous arches.

But unlike several other office revamps that show well in initial images, draw a flash of attention and turn out to be complete failures, De Waterhond has actually proven to be an intelligent restoration and a lovely work space.

Two years ago, the small staff of the architectural firm Klaararchitectuur moved into a former chapel that the firm‘s founder, architect Gregory Nijs, owns.

With Nijs’s’ lead the firm had reconfigured the structure completely to meet not just their own need for offices, but Nijs’s wish to restore the heritage protected building and reopen it to the public.

In a recent interview with TCH, Klaararchitectuur reflected on the project and updated us on the life of De Waterhond.

The town of Sint-Truiden in the Flemish Region has several UNESCO World Heritage Sites and other historically important structures, but demolition threatens many other sites that are not seen as valuable.

De Waterhond was constructed in the 16th century, possibly as a private house. It became a Catholic chapel in the 18th century, was then converted into an arts academy and later used as a peace court and a drama rehearsal space. However, it had been empty and unused for the past 50 years.

Gregory Nijs fell in love with the dilapidated building and saw its beauty and possibilities. He also feared that if it was not renovated soon, it would be demolished.

However, as anyone familiar with restoring what was more or less a ruin can attest, wanting to do it and actually doing it are two different things, usually separated by significant sums of money.

Nijs does not disclose the final cost of the restoration, but it is clear after the first two years of use that the sacrifice and effort have been worth it.

According to Nijs, the most challenging aspect of the restoration was taking into account the existing timbers in the design. In the construction phase, it was the height that proved the biggest challenge.

To adhere to the restrictions of a listed building and to leave the historical structure as intact as possible, Nijs solved the problem of marrying the past and present by building a separate three-story stack of office ‘boxes’ inside the high, open space.

The staff of six now works within the two offices and a meeting room that juts out of the top floor. The total new area is 120 square metres. The open first floor is the public space of 180 square metres.

Since the opening day, the public area has been in active use hosting art exhibitions, corporate dinners, jazz concerts and photo shoots.

It is not clear why the building has been called De Waterhond or Kapel De Waterhond but the staff at Klaarchitectuur suspects it might be related to the Cicindra stream that ran freely before but has been arcaded or underground for a long time.

With its rich history visible, De Waterhond is now a living, multi-functional space of creativity, cleverly blending its past with the present while creating for the future.

Eliska Design Associates is excited with the announcement of upcoming exhibition Azzedine Alaïa: The Couturier to take place at The Design Museum in May 2018.

Conceived and co-curated with Monsieur Alaïa before his death in November 2017, the exhibition charts his incredible journey from sculptor to couturier, his nonconformist nature and his infectious energy for fashion, friendship and the female body.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Alaïa personally constructed each garment by hand and refused to bow to the pressures of fashion week deadlines, instead working to his own schedule. His collaborative approach earned him an esteemed client list, including Greta Garbo, Grace Jones, Michelle Obama and Rihanna.

Norweigen architecture firm, Snøhetta has revealed plans for a sustainable ring-shaped hotel, that will be nestled at the base of Norway's Almlifjellet mountain, within the Artic Circle.

The Svart Hotel, which takes its name from the nearby Svartisen glacier, will be energy-positive – meaning it will produce more energy than it consumes.

While consumption rates will be 85 per cent lower than contemporary hotels, the building's solar panels will produce energy, something the architects believe is an "absolute must in the precious arctic environment."

Working with a handful of other Norwegian companies, Snøhetta began the design process by extensively researching how the hotel could use renewable energy, with the aim of making as little impact on the mountain environment as possible.

Mapping the movement of the sun's rays, the architects decided that a circular structure topped with solar panels would provide optimum levels of light throughout the day and across different seasons.

Recessed terraces have been integrated along the hotel's facade that shade rooms during the summer, replacing the presence of artificial cooling systems. Fronted by a large window, rooms can also exploit the sun's thermal energy during the colder weather.

The new chapel, set within a vineyard in South Africa, is designed by South-African born Coetzee Steyn of London based Steyn Studio. Its serene sculptural form emulates the silhouette of surrounding mountain ranges, paying tribute to the historic Cape Dutch gables dotting the rural landscapes of the Western Cape. Constructed from a slim concrete cast shell, the roof supports itself as each undulation dramatically falls to meet the ground. Where each wave of the roof structure rises to a peak, expanses of glazing adjoined centrally by a crucifix adorn the façade.

Drawing poetic inspiration from Psalm 36:7 (How priceless is your unfailing love, O God! People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.) the crisp white form is conceived as a lightweight, and dynamic structure which appears to float within the valley. A reflective pond emphasises the apparent weightlessness of the structure. Elevated upon a plinth, the chapel rises from the flat land its sits upon, providing a hierarchical focal point within its surroundings. New planting including a vineyard and pomegranate orchard create a lush green oasis on the otherwise exposed site.

Inside, a large and open assembly space is created within a simple rectangular plan. Highly polished terazzo floors reflect light internally. The undulating whitewashed ceiling casts an array of shadows which dance within the volume as light levels change throughout the day. This modest palette of materials creates a neutral background to the impressive framed views of the vineyard and mountains beyond. 

n order to keep the structural form of the roof and assembly space pure, other elements of the buildings functional programme are either hidden within the plinth, or discretely within the outer corners of the surrounding garden.

n open embrace which invites in, the chapel is also a space that extends outwards into the valley and mountains beyond, raising the awareness of God’s creation in the immediate environment.

Freeform at Timothy Taylor, London is an exhibition comparing works by Jean Dubuffet, Simon Hantaï and Charlotte Perriand.  The works are presented as meeting of art and design through a dialogue of formal structure and organic forms, as defined by three French pioneers working across mediums of painting, sculpture and furniture.

This week we celebrate the life and work of Wendell Castle, following his death earlier this month.

Father of the art furniture movement, Wendell Castle has been a sculptor, designer, and educator for more than four decades. 

An influential artist, his work has led to the development of handcrafted, modern designer furniture as a major art form and his name is revered above all others in the field.  

His bold and graceful pieces, often organic, and sometimes whimsical, are crafted from rare and beautiful hardwoods, plastics, veneers, and metals in a timeless contemporary style. His expression of colour and exotic materials are synonymous with the Wendell Castle name.  Born and educated in Kansas, Castle moved to Rochester, New York in 1961 and taught at the School for American Craftsmen. He is currently Artist-in-Residence at the school and maintains his art studio in nearby Scottsville. He has been recognised for several awards and his work ‘Ghost Clock’  is incorporated into  the Smithsonian Museum collection.  This trompe l’oeil work, pictured above, is carved from a single piece of wood, to represent a cloaked grandfather clock. 

When Mr. Castle began exhibiting in galleries, his works were viewed as fundamentally radical, one art critic wrote: “The visual presence of a piece now outweighed its function, design outweighed technique, and form was more important than material.”

Mr. Castle’s only hands-on carpentry training was in an eighth-grade woodworking class. He began his professional career making sculptural furniture by wielding a chain saw.

He graduated into gluing thin layers of wood together, pioneering that process for sculpting, and later to 3D modeling and computer-guided lathes, routers and milling machines to carve bulbous and ellipsoidal furnishings that doubled as sculptures.

His favorite tool, however, was a pencil.

His sinuous, biomorphic chairs, tables, desks, pianos, clocks and vanities, which resembled giant teeth, a human tongue, elephants’ feet and human forms, started as freestyle drawings on rag paper. They morphed into urethane foam models that were laser-scanned by computer, sculpted in slices by a 5,000-pound room-size robot and finished by hand with chisels, sanders and other tools.

“Wood, I realized, could be shaped and formed and carved in ways limited only by my imagination,” Mr. Castle once said.

Trained as an industrial designer and a sculptor, Mr. Castle was after World War II part of what was known as the American studio craft movement. His idiosyncratic works became prized as collectibles, if not necessarily for comfort.