Form Before Function
By Edwin Heathcote for the Financial Times
Currectly on view at the Hayward Gallery in London is an exhibition of fascinating installations by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto titled “New Décor”. In his most recent article for the Financial Times, Edwin Heathcote discusses this exhibition and others and the theme of combining of art and the interior.
As Heathcote explains:
“The New Décor exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery grasps a theme that has insinuated itself into the history of modern art: the idea of the transformation of the everyday object, the familiar backdrop to our lives, through imagination.
It arrives at the same time as the Barbican’s “Surreal House” reveals the dark underbelly of the domestic subconscious and a new exhibition at the Timothy Taylor Gallery, “The Tightrope Walker”, explores the parallels between art and design in the 1950s Paris...
But what has happened recently is that designers have looked more to art and the practices of art for inspiration than they have to a modernist tradition of the expression of function. This has led to a decreasing distance between the disciplines, which can create compelling conditions...
It is an irony that artists, who strip the décor back to its subconscious, dream-like elements, can be more honest about use and meaning than can the designers who have been brought up in a tradition of the expression of function and utility. But this show also explains the need for the two parallel traditions of interpretation. The art is in the artifice and, as Debord said, it is the false that gives us the true picture. Art, design and interior are coming together, not because they are getting closer as disciplines but because they need each other to communicate the full range of meaning in the home.”
For more information on “New Decor” at the Hayward Gallery, please visit www.haywardgallery.org.uk
Installation by Ernesto Neto for "New Décor" at the Hayward Gallery, London, 2010
Installation by Ernesto Neto for "New Décor" at the Hayward Gallery, London, 2010
Installation by Ernesto Neto for "New Décor" at the Hayward Gallery, London, 2010
