El Ultimo Grito - Dialogues
25th March - 1st May 2010

With the arrival of Abandon Architectures, El Ultimo Grito’s new book, The Aram Gallery is pleased to present three collections of work from 2009 and 2010, not yet seen in the UK.

Known for their engaging reinvention of objects, and large scale installations, El Ultimo Grito’s more recent work has included direct questioning of cultural and social preconceptions. This new direction is embodied in the selected works for this exhibition which include: a group of large blown glass installation pieces exploring architectural archetypes created with master glassblowers in Italy; a collection of lightweight cardboard and resin furniture, incorporating structural ingenuity with rich colouring and suggesting an alternative design and production method for a permanent dining table; and ‘Found objects: Dialogues’ a series of photographic re-appropriations of famous quotes.

Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado are the Post Disciplinary studio El Ultimo Grito. Their work “reflects upon their interest in how contemporary culture incorporates, re-uses and re-interprets the systems and structures that it has inherited. Within this context the challenge is to create new objects, which can be typologically disentangled from our conventional (learned) understanding of the world, and thus offer alternative ways to live, work and communicate.”

El Ultimo Grito’s work has been widely exhibited and is collected by leading International museums and galleries.

In 2008 the practice was renamed EUG Studio during a two year residency in Berlin. Now based back in London the studio’s work has expanded into a distinct critical practice along side Product design and Art Direction. Both partners teach at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths University, as well as being acting visiting Professors at HFBK, Hamburg University. The Aram Gallery thanks Kingston University Design Department where Rosario Hurtado and Roberto Feo are visiting senior research fellows, for supporting this exhibition.

For press enquiries contact Anna Meyer at Origin Communications 0207729 0007/ anna@originuk.com

Prototypes and Experiments IV
21st January - 6th March 2010

Tomás Alonso
Michael Antrobus
Arash & Kelly
Thomas Feichtner
Gitta Gschwendtner
Crispin Jones
Ronen Kadushin
Simon Maidment
Nucleo
Damien Poulain
Vladimir Rachev
Hiroko Shiratori
David Sutton
Nina Tolstrup
Vandasye
William Warren & Carl Clerkin
Joe Wentworth
Ben Wilson

The Aram Gallery is delighted to open the fourth in the ongoing series Prototypes and Experiments with a new batch of exhibits sourced from the studios of emerging and established designers. This time there are a significant number of objects exploring ideas in metal.

Prototypes and experiments are critical elements in the development process of any new design. The prototype is the manifestation of the design idea on its way to production; experiments are more like steps on the way. The prototype, being part of a process, makes more real an idea that will lead to a final piece, and is not made with the intention of being sold or shown outside the designer’s studio. Experiments are also unique artefacts but are even less refined and sometimes constitute a partial sketch on the way to the prototype.

These objects however, can hold a rare charm; there’s an increased closeness to the designer’s imagination, and a directness to the making that often changes when manufacturing and marketing forces are fully integrated. The objects might be characterised by a technical or material discrepancy, compared to the final product, due to a lack of access of the designer to technology at the process stage. It’s a stark contrast to the current wave of limited editions - which has made for the unique to be diluted by multiples and for the production piece to be restrained in order to increase the value of singular pieces.

The Aram Gallery is interested in the way designers think and work. We have chosen to present these unique artefacts as part of an ongoing search for insight into the design process. Prototypes and Experiments will include selected drawings alongside the pieces taken from the designers’ physical or digital sketchbooks.

Curator: Daniel Charny
Assistant Curator: Ellie Parke
Gallery Director: Zeev Aram

For press information please contact Anna Meyer at Origin Communications on 020 7278 0068 or email anna@originuk.com

More images on Flickr

Thinking: Objects
Contemporary Approaches to Product Design by Tim Parsons

11th December 2009 - 9th January 2010

The Aram Gallery hosts the launch of Thinking: Objects, a new book for students, graduates, practising designers and anyone with an interest in contemporary product design. The book looks at the many approaches designers take to their work and discusses their motivation. It highlights the ways in which products communicate value and meaning through form, giving designers tools with which to create their own designs. It also explores what the design process feels like in the mind and shows how drawing and model making aid decision-making.

The exhibition will illustrate a selection of the ideas explored in the book and will include products designed by Konstantin Grcic, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Naoto Fukasawa and Daniel Weil among others.

About the author
Tim Parsons is a product designer, writer and lecturer on design. Mixing influences from craft and industrial design, his projects examine notions of familiarity, functionality and the quality of materials and processes.

Parsons has led teaching workshops in France, Italy, Sweden and Poland. He contributes regularly to the British design press reviewing exhibitions and writing features for Blueprint magazine and has written on design for Phaidon books. Parsons is currently a Senior Lecturer in Three Dimensional Design at Camberwell College of Arts, London.

Thinking Objects is published by AVA Publishing
Design by Studio EMMI

www.timparsons.info

Photography by Tim Parsons

Thinking: Objects
Contemporary Approaches to Product Design by Tim Parsons

11th December 2009 - 9th January 2010

The Aram Gallery hosts the launch of Thinking: Objects, a new book for students, graduates, practising designers and anyone with an interest in contemporary product design. The book looks at the many approaches designers take to their work and discusses their motivation. It highlights the ways in which products communicate value and meaning through form, giving designers tools with which to create their own designs. It also explores what the design process feels like in the mind and shows how drawing and model making aid decision-making.

The exhibition will illustrate a selection of the ideas explored in the book and will include products designed by Konstantin Grcic, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Naoto Fukasawa and Daniel Weil among others.

About the author
Tim Parsons is a product designer, writer and lecturer on design. Mixing influences from craft and industrial design, his projects examine notions of familiarity, functionality and the quality of materials and processes.

Parsons has led teaching workshops in France, Italy, Sweden and Poland. He contributes regularly to the British design press reviewing exhibitions and writing features for Blueprint magazine and has written on design for Phaidon books. Parsons is currently a Senior Lecturer in Three Dimensional Design at Camberwell College of Arts, London.

Thinking Objects is published by AVA Publishing
Design by Studio EMMI

www.timparsons.info

GRASSWORKS
17th September to 28th November 2009

Made of bamboo, designed for flat-pack delivery, dry (no glue) self-assembly structures with space saving storage solutions are some of the worthy features in Jair Straschnow’s furniture collection Grassworks. This checklist is good, but the most exciting aspect of this collection is the integrity, in both the structural and the aesthetic sense, of the design.

Straschnow has a distinctive way of working – he launches into an intense immersive process driven by specific fascinations and usually with loyalty to a single material. The exhibits are the fruits of this method applied to Bamboo sheet laminates, and the manipulation of traditional interlocking woodworking techniques. It is a focused, hands-on, trial and error, design process. A good example of this fascination and perhaps most visible in Grassworks, is the reworking of the dovetail joint. The dovetail is a straightforward principle of slotting pieces of wood that have opposing sloped angles to wedge themselves against one another.
It is much used in western joinery and Japanese woodwork. Straschnow uses the Dovetail joint not only as a detail but more interestingly as a core structural principle, showing a mastery of design rather then craft.

The dovetail, like the other geometric locking principles applied in Grassworks, serves Straschnow as practical inspiration. Through various iterations and applications he generates objects that share a sense of utility. Combining the satisfaction of construction toys and the charm of interlocking treasure boxes, these furniture prototypes present an original and sparse elemental language, simple but not obvious. Added to the playful control evident in the details, and the shapes derived from the logic of the construction itself, reveals designs that are both experimental and new. Unlike many of the similarly shaped and like-minded computer generated designs we have been subjected to in recent years, Grassworks, like Jair Straschnow, are products of their own internal logic.

The exhibition includes recently developed production ready prototypes, exhibited internationally for the first time. Israeli born Straschnow studied industrial design at the Holon Institute of Technology. Following his postgraduate studies at the Applied Arts Department Sandberg Instituut he settled in the Netherlands where he works from his Amsterdam based studio. This is his first solo exhibition in the UK.

www.straschnow.com

Curator: Daniel Charny
Assistant Curator: Ellie Parke
Gallery Director: Zeev Aram
Graphic Design: Ayelet Yanai www.ayeletyanai.com

This exhibition is listed as part of the London Design Festival 2009

The exhibition is supported by:

Bambusa

Mondriaan Foundation

Significant Colour from 8th May to 27th June 2009

Significant Colour is an exhibition that will examine objects and artworks where colour is the first aspect that the viewer responds to, and the impact of colour, their most memorable feature.

Colour is a deeply emotive subject. For most of us it is also highly personal, we each have a unique response to colour that we develop internally through experience and association. How we feel about certain colours often has more to do with what our childhood bedroom walls were painted with than anything else. Experiences, good and bad, associated with certain colours affect our response. Josef Albers famously showed 100 people the exact same shade of iconic Coca Cola red and the resulting descriptions implied 100 different shades of that colour. We all see and relate to colour differently therefore making it an almost impossible subject to predict and define with any certainty. What can be said is that colour is ‘Significant’ for human beings. Our awareness in certain cultures of how significant is questionable but our desire to place colour in and around our environments, on our bodies and the outside of our dwellings is in strong evidence from the beginning of mankind’s journey into consciousness.

In western thinking of the 20th century Colour and its potential gravitas seems to have diminished, become secondary, decorative; deeming an object or artwork less serious or intellectual than it’s less chromatic counterparts. More recently there seems a desire to readdress this balance. Especially on the façade of buildings, a most visible renaissance is taking place where intelligent colour is being use to serve form and function and take pole position.

A more refined appreciation and understanding of colour as a tool is shaping how we use it. Recognising the importance of not just the ‘chroma’ (shade) of a colour, but its ‘saturation’ (depth and brightness) and ‘value’ (lightness or darkness) has enhanced its role within art and design. Scientific colour tests reveal that often it is the saturation of a colour that we respond to rather than the colour itself. A very intense and saturated blue can be much more energizing to the heart and mind than a dark, somber red, defying the common notion that blue calms and red stimulates. Colour is a powerful tool capable of affecting emotional wellbeing and intellectual motivation.

‘Significant Colour’ presents a diverse selection of objects and artworks; furniture, lighting, graphics, architecture, photography, textiles and jewellery each exploring these principals in a unique way. These works are not merely about being ‘colourful’ but engaging the viewer to think more deeply about why they employ the colours they do and the implications behind their nuances of tone, shade, material colour, surface and application. Some play with process and substance, others with scale and emotion but they all reveal and celebrate the significance of their colour.

Ptolemy Mann February 2009

SIGNIFICANT COLOUR @ ARAM

This multi-disciplinary exhibition will include furniture, photography, textiles, jewellery design, graphics, lighting design, architecture and fine art. Exhibiting are: dRMM, Ori Gersht, James Goggin, El Ultimo Grito, Sauerbruch Hutton, Ptolemy Mann, Olivier Droillard, Mah Rana, Sophie Smallhorn and Christian Zuzunaga.

The Aram Gallery is an independently curated space that encourages and promotes understanding of contemporary design, by presenting experimental and new work with a special interest in the work of designers and artists in their early careers.

Guest Curator Ptolemy Mann
Curator Daniel Charny
Assistant Curator Ellie Parke
Director Zeev Aram

Kindly supported by the Arts Council England

www.artscouncil.org.uk

12th February to 18th April 2009

Prototypes and Experiments

The Aram Gallery is continuing its series of displays made up of prototypes and experiments sourced from designers’ studios. The displays form a long-term and ever-changing exhibition, with a new piece brought into the gallery each time another is sold or returned to its owner. Prototypes and experiments are critical elements in the development process of any new design.

The prototype is the manifestation of the design idea on its way to production; experiments are more like steps on the way.

The prototype, being part of a process, makes more real an idea that will lead to a final piece, and is not made with the intention of being sold or shown outside the designers’ studio. Experiments are also unique artefacts but are even less refined and sometimes constitute a partial sketch on the way to the prototype.

These objects however, can hold a rare charm; there’s an increased closeness to the designer’s imagination, and a directness to the making that often changes when manufacturing and marketing forces are fully integrated. The objects might be characterised by a technical or material discrepancy, compared to the final product, due to a lack of access of the designer to technology at the process stage. It’s a stark contrast to the current wave of limited editions - which has made for the unique to be diluted by multiples and for the production piece to be restrained in order to increase the value of singular pieces.

The Aram gallery is interested in the way designers think and work. We have chosen to present these unique artefacts as part of our ongoing search for insight into the design process. To accompany the prototypes the exhibition will include selected drawings taken from the designers physical or digital sketchbooks.

This cycle will feature; Roger Arquer, Shin Azumi, Georg Baldele, Carl Clerkin, Nigel Coates, Caterina Fadda and Fran Santos, Gitta Gschwendtner, Demelza Hill, Yaacov Kaufman, Andre Klauser, Tomas Kral, Max Lamb, Tomek Rygalik, Rolf Sachs, Nina Tolstrup and Ben Wilson.

Curator Daniel Charny
Assistant Curator Ellie Parke
Director Zeev Aram

Kindly supported by the Arts Council England

www.artscouncil.org.uk

CRU by Sebastian Bergne
New Design Around Wine

The Aram Gallery presents new work by established industrial designer Sebastian Bergne. Having worked in the past 18 years to briefs set by leading companies such as Authentics, Moulinex and Muji, Bergne has agreed to take on the challenge of designing and producing a range of speculative objects under his own name.

Self-initiated and self-produced work is the ultimate model for the designer as author. The designer not only sets the brief, but also approves the results and takes them through to production. It is the dream, the delight but also the dread of undisturbed control over the process and product. Then the design searches a user, and, following first impressions, desire and purchase, the design is finally challenged with fulfilling its promise on neutral ground.

Like a growing number of designers, Bergne’s new practice fulfils a desire to produce under ones own name. This self-initiated working style is a traditionally attractive pursuit for younger designers who often lack much needed industrial contacts.

Increasingly, established names are also creating independent brands which are sometimes picked up by well-known companies.
Having recently returned to London after a seven year spell in Bologna, CRU* signals a new period in Bergne’s practice. The works exhibited are therefore both a reflection on his newfound design independence, and a response to an invigorated practice in London.

The pieces in CRU have been inspired by the way wine culture is intertwined in day to day life for most people in Italy. It includes concepts of transporting, storing, serving and enjoying new ways of consuming wine. Although some items are ready for production and available to purchase, the exhibition is primarily a series of experiments.

The Aram Gallery is pleased to continue to provide a platform for initiating and launching new experimental work and thanks the Arts Council for supporting these special projects.

*CRU is a wine term that means ‘growth’. Sometimes used as a means of classifying quality wines. In French CRU also means: raw, rough, unfinished and believed.

Curator Daniel Charny
Assistant Curator Ellie Parke
Graphic design Jeremy Hofmeister-Mac Lynn
Director Zeev Aram

Photography Helen Mellor

The Aram Gallery has been awarded Grants for the Arts funding from the Arts Council

www.artscouncil.org.uk