Phillips de Pury & Company opens the first UK solo exhibition of Japanese design studio, Nendo.
The exhibition will be presented in two parts and split between two galleries. Part 1: Thin Black Lines, features a new series of bent, solid, tubular steel works on view at the Saatchi Gallery. Part 2: Blurry White Surfaces, offers the UK audience a greater sense of Nendo’s design ethos with an installation of pieces from their recent repertoire and includes master works such as Cord and Fade out. Exhibition open through Sunday, 31 October 2010.
Blurry White Surfaces at Howick Place is a retrospective of major earlier works including cord-chair and fadeout-chair. Thin Black Lines, on view at Saatchi Gallery, presents twenty-nine new designs executed in steel.
Blurry White Surfaces is composed primarily of work shown in the ‘ghost stories’ solo show that toured New York and Milan. The show brought together pieces that explored unusual techniques and materials and manipulated textures as a way of creating ambiguous objects with an eerily faint presence—objects that seem to appear, disappear, and reappear.
‘Outlines’ are the theme of Thin Black Lines. Slight black lines like the traces of sketches make transparent surfaces and volumes appear, which are assigned practical functions. They are expressions of condensed meaning, similar to Japanese calligraphy, with its simplification of plant and animal imagery into outlines.
A book with an essay by design historian and Japan specialist, Dr. Sarah Teasley of the Royal College of Art will be published and available during the exhibition.
Oki Sato opened his multi-disciple design studio, Nendo (Japanese for clay), in 2002, the same year he received his M.A. in architecture from Waseda University, Tokyo. Despite the studio’s young life they have been prolific, completing an astonishing number of remarkable projects in architecture, interior, product and graphic design. Nendo’s watershed, two-part “Ghost Stories” exhibition at Friedman Benda Gallery and New York’s Museum of Arts & Design in 2009 was embraced by both critics and collectors.
The Saatchi Gallery
Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road London SW3 4SQ
10am-6pm, 7 days a week, last entry 5:30pm
Phillips de Pury & Company
Howick Place London SW1P 1BB
Monday-Friday 10am-6pm
www.phillipsdepury.com
