KVADRAT Exploration
R&D for Danish textile company Kvadrat that predominantly revolves around the idea of coating fragments of furniture with fabric rather than falling back on the more commonly seen real world simulation of fabrics. Employing a fluid, almost water-like approach to motion we see abstract furniture fragments emerging from the fabric; its amorphous forms continually re-configuring itself for a graphic, textural delight.
Float
The Floats – or floating sculptures – that Robert Breer took up producing again at the end of the 1990s, emerged in 1965. The word “float” meaning something floating – a marker, fishing float or buoy – and which also describes those carnival vehicles whose pretend wheels give them the appearance of floating above the tarmac, enabled Robert Breer to apply this principle to works of a new genre. Primary shapes, neutral colours and, for the most recent, an industrial aspect, the Floats were then made with polystyrene, foam, painted plywood, and, more latterly, out of fibreglass. At first glance, these simple structures appear immobile. In fact, they are moving, imperceptibly, within the space they inhabit. Motorised and on mini-rollers – which raise them slightly above ground, giving them an air of weightlessness – they glide unbeknown to the visitor, following random paths that are interrupted by the slightest obstacle that they encounter.
露西·麦克雷和巴特·赫斯
Люси Мак Рае и Барт Хесс
“Lucyandbart” is a collaboration between artists Lucy McRae and Bart Hess. In it they imagine human bodies and faces physically altered with a shocking but artistic realism. Globules of foam, asymmetric spines… fascinating and repugnant simultaneously, the pictures become even more disturbing because they don’t hint at the emotional state of the subject. Each transformed human looks blankly back at you, neither horrified or surprised or excited about their change of form, but merely present and allowing it to be shown to you.
Bad Cat
“A giant cat made of foam and tangerine velvet with a wide, cartoonish, sharp-toothed grimace, almost fifteen feet high, is flipped on its back at the center of the gallery. It’s vulnerable—it looks like it’s yowling—and its shadow is a cut-out wraith of blue carpet.” Erin Schwartz.
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Da Corte often uses surreal imagery and everyday objects in his practice and explores ideas of consumerism, pop culture, mythology, and literature.
The other side
This installation automatically creates a three-dimensional relief carving of the current cloud formations and ocean surface conditions on the opposite side of the earth from the location of the gallery space. Using satellite data from the Nasa Earth Observing Information System and the GPS coordinates of the gallery, the installation obtains a current image of an approximately six hundred square mile area on the opposite side of the earth from its location. Using custom software, the system converts this image into a relief model that is sent to an onsite CNC machine hanging upside down in the gallery space. The CNC machine carves the relief in pink foam with its upside-down orientation directly echoing the cloud and ocean topography on the opposite side of earth.
Animi Causa
Feel Seating Deluxe can shift into many different shapes and sizes, making it incredibly diverse and cosy. You can fold it and mold it any way you like. This seating system is made of 120 plush soft balls which you can lay, sit or lounge on. Feel Seating comes in bright red and blue colour which will lighten any room. The balls are made of 100% foam, while the upholstery is made of special stretch fabric. Although this sectional sofa might be too risqué for some, its comfort is undeniable.
露西·麦克雷和巴特·赫斯
Люси Мак Рае и Барт Хесс
Imagine human bodies and faces physically altered with a shocking but artistic realism. Globules of foam, asymmetric spines… fascinating and repugnant simultaneously, the pictures become even more disturbing because they don’t hint at the emotional state of the subject. Each transformed human looks blankly back at you, neither horrified or surprised or excited about their change of form, but merely present and allowing it to be shown to you.
Row Colors: Invertuals 2
These oversized, misshapen, foamy straightjacket bundles were made by Eindhoven-based duo Raw Color for design collective Dutch Invertuals. In a sweet range of minty pastels they look like they should provide a comfy bed, but wrapped around a head they’re more likely to suffocate. Created a couple of years ago as press material for Dutch Invertual’s participation in home furnishings exhibition Salone Internazionale del Mobile, the series creatively illustrates the malleability of material by taking flat foam and creating strange, abstract human sculptures.
That a Dead Man Sings
Creating sculptures out of materials such as sheets of glass, foam, metal, cement, and various found objects, Dave Hardy composes his sculptures’ seemingly precarious poise as an intentionally engineered defiance of gravity. Distinguished by a constant shuttle between literal and allegorical readings, Hardy’s artworks are both resolutely materialist and infused with a human scale and, more precisely, a human fragility that forces the viewer to confront them as bodies in space.
Фридмен, Том
톰 프리드먼
トム・フリードマン
Tom Friedman’s art has been exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally. The quirky, and flawlessly executed work tends to defy categorization. While his art is often linked to 1960s Conceptualism and Minimal art, Friedman invents his own visual language through his almost obsessive attentiveness to detail and his striking ability to transform the familiar into the unexpected. He uses common household materials such as aluminum foil, spaghetti, fishing line, hair, Styrofoam, and Play-Doh to create works that rearrange the viewer’s perceptions of the everyday environment.
ארווין וורם
アーウィンウーム
ЭРВИН ВУРМ
Erwin Wurm, one of Austria’s most important and internationally famous sculptors, has been preoccupied with expanding the concept of sculpture since the 1980s. Wurm is primarily a sculptor, and traditional sculptural concerns such as the relationship between object and pedestal, the function of gravity, the fixing of form, and the manipulation of volume, play through all his work.
Increasing, remodeling or removing volume, the habitual interests of many sculptors, are given a new twist in Wurm’s work. Volume and adding volume are treated as sociocrital issues. In 1993, Erwin Wurm wrote an instructional book on how to gain two clothing sizes in eight days. Eight years later, he made his first Fat Car by plumping up an existing car with styrofoam and fiberglass, which resulted in a pitiful, chubby version of the original sportsy model. By taking the question of obesity, Wurm probes the link between power, wealth and body weight. He also wants to offer a sharp criticism of our current value system, as the advertising world demands us to stay thin but to consume more and more.
Spheres
Dutch designer Maria Blaisse is one of those legends. She began in the early 80s’ by creating spherical foam forms that moulded and folded in ways that were revolutionary at the time and she worked primarily in dance wear where she is still breaking new ground today. Blaisse then went on to collaborate with Issey Miyake for whom she made mitre-like rubber hats.
كوهي ناوا
名和晃平
КОХЕЙ НАВА
foam
Japanese artist Kohei Nawa has immersed visitors at the aichi triennale in undulating sea of bubbling matter, surrounding the walls and floor in porous, cloud-like material. ‘Foam’ inhabits an almost pitch-black room, creating an ethereal quality that seems aesthetically otherworldly walking through the space, the topography of the puffs creates a massive terrain of floating material, stiff enough to stand in place, yet copious in its fragility and delicacy.
foam chair
Periscope: Foam Tower
terraform 01
“A sense of location within one’s physical space, culture and history plays a crucial role in the creation of my work. While images and ideas often begin with the landscape, I am also drawn to the incorporation of non-art materials (e.g., foam, packing peanuts, bubble wrap and PVC tubes) and the juxtaposition of ambiguous imagery, deliberately subverting viewer’s visual expectations. My work invokes the paradoxical notion of “harmonious conflict” where compositional/conceptual relationship of materials and images are questioned and yet valued.”
Transient Materialization
Created by Shih-Yuan Wang, Yu-Ting Sheng, Dr. Alex Barchiesi and Vyacheslav Kryvosheya with guidance from Prof. Jeffrey Huang at the Media and Design Laboratory LDM, EPFL / SINLAB, Transient Materialization explores the relationship between digital and material-based digital fabrication through n-hedron structure composed mainly of soap foam that is blown, through a mixture of air and helium, into a foam structure.The project questions structure’s materiality and examines its physical performance and ephemeral characteristics. In the first phase of the project the team achieved a programmable foam structure and presented various configurations of dynamic and transformable foam structures. The fabrication interacts with the algorithm, which involves a mixture of air and helium (controlled by pneumatic valves) and additive chemical substances and thickening agents.The aim of the project is to take architecture beyond the creation of static forms and into the design of dynamic, transformable and ephemeral material experimental processes.
Strange Fruit
Using both sculpture and musical performance in his practice, Kevin Beasley explores the physical materiality and cultural connotations of both objects and sound. His sculptures typically incorporate everyday items like clothing, housewares, or sporting goods, bound together using tar, foam, resin, or other materials. Often they also contain embedded audio equipment that warps and amplifies the ambient tones of their surroundings. For Storylines, Beasley has created two new works specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Within this vast and open sonic environment, Strange Fruit (Pair 1) and Strange Fruit (Pair 2) (both 2015) offer an experience of intimacy, absorbing and reflecting the sound of the crowd at the scale of a personal conversation. Each work embodies this spirit of dialogue in its two-part structure—at its core are two athletic shoes, one merged with microphones, the other with speakers. Suspending these objects in space, Beasley compounds their technological interchange with additional layers of meaning, bringing to mind the urban phenomenon of shoes hanging from overhead wires or poles (itself an open-ended form of communication). At the same time the works’ titles refer to history of lynchings in the American South memorialized by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meerepol in the 1937 protest song “Strange Fruit.” In these contexts, the hanging forms of Beasley’s sculptures resonate not only with his body, which molded them by hand, or with the bodies moving through the museum, but also with those inscribed in the problematic history of race and class in the United States.
Mute Room (Memory Foam)
Bounce
«Bounce» is a foam sculpture, which transforms into a soft and comfortable chair, at the moment when someone sits on it. It bounces back up, after it’s user left, and will never stand around empty. It’s shape is symmetric and invites to sit in it, in every possible position and from every side.