Dutch artist Aldo Bakker has recently showcased some of his powerful and original design pieces at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York.
“Powerful, elegant and filled with personality, Aldo’s furniture brings a new perspective, not seen before in the design space” said gallery co-founder Loic Le Gaillard in a project statement.
Hard not to agree. Self-Taught designer, Aldo Bakker started his career as a jewelry designer and moved after to industrial design, creating tableware and furniture. We can imagine his family background ignited part of his interest. In fact, he is the son of jewelry designer Emmy van Leersum and Gijs Bakker, a pioneer of conceptual design who founded Dutch design collective Droog.
The collection presented at the New York gallery is called “Slow Motion” and exemplifies Bakker’s attitude towards his work.
Since the beginning of his career, his exquisite use of shape, material and color balances his unresting quest to understand and question the way his objects relate with man.
Their appearance may be tranquil, yet it is never submissive because it is their shape that determines the way we can interact with them and, in this way, undermine our fixed notions about the object as a commodity.
As a result, the powerful design pieces by Aldo Bakker leave the realm of the inanimate design to enter our everyday life and challenge it.
“Every convention – whether it concerns artistic legacy, beauty or plain purpose – needs to be challenged. And every creation is an exploration of the senses.”
The collection includes 17 pieces, such as stools, tables, and vessels whose materiality spans marble, quartzite to Urushi lacquer, a special Japanese technique that uses several layers of thin, semi-transparent lacquer to create a deep surface. Urushi comes from the sap of the lacquer tree and is very durable and resistant to acid, heat and water.
The chubby stools Three Pair, Weight/Wait and 4PRTS are particularly interesting which were cast in Sandstone, Urushi and “Azur Summer Sky” marble. Also we find particularly interesting the gold-tinged room divider Flat Brown, a structure made of aluminum, that seems to disappear when look at from the narrower sides.
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Photography by Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
