Robert Stadler | OMG-GMO

Robert Stadler | OMG-GMO

比雷埃夫斯 Polidefkous 39 號,雅典 Carwan 畫廊 | 2023年6月22日 – 9月16日

Carwan Gallery 攜手 BITOSSI Ceramiche,呈現 Robert Stadler 的 OMG-GMO 系列作品。

Carwan Gallery 於 2023 年夏季在其位於比雷埃夫斯的旗艦空間,展出備受期待、由巴黎設計師 Robert Stadler 全新委託創作的 OMG-GMO 系列。該項目歷時兩年多精心打造,是一系列異想天開的陶瓷功能性物件,由義大利頂尖家族陶瓷企業 BITOSSI Ceramiche 手工製作。該項目曾於去年秋天在康乃狄克州新迦南菲利普強生標誌性的玻璃屋(Glass House)展館,以及 2023 年米蘭設計週(Fuorisalone 2023)期間進行預展——並由 Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte 於米蘭策劃展出。OMG-GMO 系列作品僅限透過 Carwan Gallery 購藏。

Known for his diverse work — which includes industrial design, installation, curation, and performance — Austrian-born designer Robert Stadler has been engaging with current issues in a critical and intellectual way throughout his decadeslong career. For his special commission for Carwan Gallery, the designer offers a wide comment on the relationship between humans and their environment, as seen through the genetic manipulation of fruit and vegetables. Spotless yellow bananas, fleshy avocados, leeks, carrots, and many other staples of our shopping baskets are transformed into humorous functional objects, in what is perhaps the designer’s most playful work to date.

The history of representing fruitage and other produce in art and design is probably as long as the history of art itself. From ancient vessels shaped as their contents to fanciful Arcimboldo paintings and Renaissance still life featuring cornucopias of food, the relationship between produce and aesthetics has been very strong and persists to this day. In dialogue with this tradition, Robert Stadler’s OMG-GMO highlights the artificiality of the tame fruit and vegetables we cultivate and consume, highlighting the fact that their current form is the result of a very long process of agricultural domestication, selective breeding, and bioengineering. Patiently “designed” over thousands of years, farming products such as tomatoes, bananas, aubergines, and many more have little resemblance to their wild, undomesticated relatives. In more recent years, this engineering has become even more extreme, incorporating genetic modification and sophisticated cultivation techniques that give fruit and vegetables of almost artificial perfection and symmetry — such as square watermelons, straight cucumbers, seedless oranges, calibrated cherries, white strawberries, and more.

For the OMG-GMO project, Robert Stadler borrows the forms of these engineered fruit and vegetables to create ten ceramic, hand-painted objects that ironically transform the organic into something structural and functional. Conceived as a series of small-scale monuments, these objects both criticise and mock human manipulation of nature: a slice of a Japanese rectangular seedless watermelon becomes a stool, zucchini bend in a perfect L shape to create a set of shelves, and wheel-like aubergines support a glass coffee table, as a reference to Gae Aulenti’s Tavolo con Ruote. Each object transforms a fruit or vegetable in a functional and clever way, with the master ceramicists at BITOSSI copying in detail their colour and texture.