Kate MacGarry

Feierabend: Francis Upritchard, Martino Gamper, Karl Fritsch

16 Jan - 22 Feb 2009

© Martino Gamper
Bent Around Stool 2009
wood
39 x 54 x 50 cm
FEIERABEND

Francis Upritchard
Martino Gamper
Karl Fritsch

16 January - 22 February 2009

Feierabend is a collaborative installation between Karl Fritsch, Martino Gamper and Francis Upritchard bringing together the shared aesthetic in their distinctive approaches to jewellery, furniture design, and sculpture.
Upritchard's ongoing series of figures in washed-out hues are interspersed among Gamper's re-interpretation of household furnishings, infected and embellished with Fritsch's rough and imperfect rings. Lit by handmade lamps, together they create an intimate setting, a place of sanguine and unsettling dreams.
Wandering in the cluster of a hidden settlement amongst a gathering of tables and chairs, sprouting with lamps, rough silver cups. Remade and careworn, these objects are familiar but transformed, evolved, shaped and branching to their own internal logic. Rings and stones peek out, imbedded in the wood or posing as handles, the furniture organically mutating and sprouting its own ornamentation.
This might be a workshop abandoned at the end of day's work, or a sitting room left in abstracted disarray, its only inhabitants a set of sculpted figures who seem lost in their own meditations. This is an alternative world, where a community has developed to a diminutive set of holy fools, busy with ever-receding aspirations.
FRANCIS UPRITCHARD (born 1976 New Zealand, lives and works in London) Upritchard will represent New Zealand at the 53rd Venice Biennale 7 June – 22 November 2009. Recent exhibitions in 2008 include Rainwob II, Artspace, Sydney; Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Art Gallery and Rainwob II, Govett Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand.
MARTINO GAMPER (born 1971 Merano, Italy, lives and works in London)
Recent exhibitions in 2008 include Wouldn't It Be Nice, Somerset House curated by Emily King; Manifesta 7, Fortezza, Italy and Designer of the Year, Design Museum, London.
KARL FRITSCH (born 1963 Sonthofen, lives and works in Munich) Exhibitions in 2007 include Metrosideros Robusta, Stedelijk Museum S`Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands; Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, Tallinn, Estonia, and in 2008 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne and Neues Museum Nürnberg in cooperation with the International Design Museum, Munich.
 

Tags: Martino Gamper, Rä di Martino, Francis Upritchard