Flower Power: the role of the vase in art, craft and design on display in Rome

With the exhibition On Flower Power. The Role of the Vase in Arts, Crafts and Design, curated by Martí Guixé, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art explores, from July 15 to September 29, 2019, the hybrid territory in which art, design and craft dialog.

The exhibition represents the National Gallery’s first opportunity to confront these languages in relation to contemporary art and focuses on an apparently neutral object: the flower vase. This element, a recurring archetype, becomes the medium of choice for a narrative that interweaves art history, applied arts history and design history.

From being an obsolete object, the vase was “rediscovered” beginning in the second half of the twentieth century when artists, architects and designers began to re-code this typology, which by then had become a true “icon” of everyday life. Thanks to the shapes and heterogeneity of use and size, the vase is reconsidered in its role as a mere container and becomes a design gymnasium through which to show one’s point of view and unleash creativity.

On Flower Power focuses attention on the empathic power of the flower and how this emotional factor is reworked within the various disciplines. “A hybrid look,” says Guixé, “at art, craft and design through an object that is already transversal in itself, the flower vase, which also becomes an empathic object precisely because of its ability to find emotional complicity with its observer. In the exhibition, the flower vase through the interpretation of the artist, artisan or designer becomes an empathic object and somehow the subject of our near future.”

On display are more than eighty works that re-interpret the tradition and iconography of the vase through design, photography, sculpture and painting. From the most significant protagonists of the international design scene such as Enzo Mari(Cerano, 1932) and Gaetano Pesce(La Spezia, 1939) to the Mendini Vase Project, a work (produced for Alessi in 1992 by Milanese architect Alessandro Mendini) that includes the work of 100 artists such as Brian Eno, Robert Venturi, Milton Glaser and Ettore Sottsass.

Reflection around the vase continues in the elegant aesthetic research of Dutch-born designer Hella Jongerius(Utrecht, 1963), the provocative language of Tobias Rehberger(Esslingen, 1966), and the irony of Franz West(Vienna, 1947 - 2012). The common denominator of the selected artists is formal experimentation and conceptual provocation, also evident in the sculptures of Austrian Oliver Laric(Innsbruck, 1981) and in the hybridization of expressive languages of the Aurora Sander duo.

A core of photographic prints and five the specimens of the FAD Cup, the trophy that each year FAD - Foment de les Arts i del Disseny commissions from contemporary artists and designers (to name a few, Antoni Cumella, André Ricard, Oscar Tusquets, Jaume Plensa, Joan Brossa, Tapies, Antoni Miralda, Mariscal, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Elias Torres, Martín Azua and Marc Monzó); the trophy is also taken up in Simone Bergantini’s research, part of whose photographic series Trophies is exhibited, trophies, deconstructed and recomposed by the artist in total freedom.

On the walls of the Central Hall some 30 still lifes from the Gallery’s collections where flowers and their containers become the dominant subject. Among them areFilippo De Pisis, Mario Mafai, Giorgio Morandi, Gaetano Previati and Toti Scialoja.

The catalog is published by Corraini Edizioni, with contributions by Martí Guixé, Giuseppe Finessi, Octavi Rofes and Jeffrey Swartz.

The creation of two works in the exhibition, designed and drawn by Martí Guixé, is the result of a collaboration with theAccademia del Costume e Moda in Rome.

For all information you can visit the Gallery’s official website.

Source: press release

Flower Power: the role of the vase in art, craft and design on display in Rome

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