Aspero por fuera suave por dentro

Varios diseñadores alemanes

15/10/92. (Sala 143)

Sala Vinçon bets once again on creative imagination.

“ROUGH ON THE OUTSIDE SOFT ON THE INSIDE”. A SAMPLE OF THE NEW GERMAN DESIGN

Since the 1980s, the FRG has developed its own formal language in the field of furniture design. While its beginnings were clearly determined by a multicolored and decorative “collage” aesthetic of Italian origin – think of “Alchimia” or “Memphis” – from the mid-1980s onwards, somewhat sober and moodily sober tendencies have been gaining ground, showing a specific expressiveness. In 1986, the Kunstumuseum Düsseldorf presented the first comprehensive exhibition of these trends in the exhibition “Gefühiscollagen – Vhnen von Sinnen” (“Collages of Sensations – Living with Tone and Sound”), which, in addition to German works, showed a representation of Italian, English, French and Swiss design. It was precisely this joint exhibition that made the peculiar character of the West-German creations evident. Some visitors to the show came to be frightened by the unmistakable hardness, emphasized by materials such as steel or concrete, by the originally textured surfaces or by the sparse use of colors. On the other hand, there is an “urban poetry” that manifests itself precisely in this “rough aesthetic” marked by the visits of urban landscapes, of areas overflowing with commerce and industry, and which, through a labyrinth of roads and highways, become more confused day by day.

In other words: the more extreme the environment, the more extreme the reaction. It should be noted, however, that this reaction does not materialize in the objects in a negative or unfavorable way. On the contrary: all this furniture expresses precisely a reflection, albeit distant, often ironic or humorous, but in any case conscious – to put it pathetically – of a West-German homeland…Seen as they are, these pieces appear as the appropriate response to the vindication of current aesthetic functions, always without disregarding the utilitarian value of the objects. Based on the Düsseldorf experience, the exhibition we present under the title “ASPERO POR FUERA, SUAVE POR DENTRO” aims to bring us closer to the German-Western design and to intervene strongly in the current discourse in the rest of Europe, because until now it has remained very much on the fringes of the advanced German criteria.

La Sala Vinçon from October 15 to November 7, 1992.