Down to Earth

Shåk gallery is delighted to host Down to earth, a group exhibition curated by Berry Dijkstra for which he arranged pieces of a new generation of designers based in the Netherlands. These include: Corradino Garofalo, Rollo Bryant, Ward Wijnant, Studio Sho Ota, Willem van Hooff, Nadia Schlenker, Tellurico, Fransje Gimbrère, Olivier van der Mark, Françoise Jeffrey, and Studio Luuk van Laarhoven. Dutch design became famous in the nineties and is still considered as cutting edge today. Nowadays with the new generation of designers who choose to study at Dutch academies, Dutch design is becoming more diverse, inclusive and international. It is more up-to-date with the world we are living in today. Down to earth references the Netherlands and its people. While usually well known for their pragmatic and hands-on attitude, it seems that, here, their scientific approach led the way to both otherworldly and primitive objects. Contemporary design is very material-driven. New ideas and forms only seem to emerge through research and experimentation. What’s more, Berry Dijkstra selected designers who aim at finding the boundaries of matter; they try to defy gravity and to find a way to show the opposite of what one would expect of a material. For instance, with Fransje Gimbrère the idea behind Standing textile is to give a new gravity, a divine gravity with its own rules that questions everything we take for granted. With this exhibition, the curator shares his outtake on where design stands today. He is interested in combining worlds that are not easily combined. Indeed, it is the contrast between the ancient-looking forms and the science fiction and out of space aesthetics that made this selection so very exciting. Those two seemingly opposite visions obviously go hand in hand. In the end, it makes us wonder if we are looking at design or art and whether the distinction still makes sense. The avant-garde never fails to give us a glimpse into the future.