8 Highlights From The First Edition Of FORMA

Programmed under the umbrella of the Madrid Design Festival, the first edition of FORMA, a commercial fair for collectable design, took place earlier this month over four days with 40 exhibits in an industrial hall in the city’s Matadero cultural centre.

With an aim to be Spain’s answer to COLLECTIBLE Brussels, and open up a national market for work at the intersection of art and design, the local media spent a good deal of time debating just what ‘collectable’ design means. For Emerio Arena and Antonio Luna, FORMA’S curators as well as art directors and editors of the Spanish design magazine ROOM, it’s a cultural moment, contemporary legacy and artistic investment. For attendees of FORMA, the answer was somewhat more straightforward—a good number agreed it was like stepping into one of the most beautiful design stores in the world. Explore our top picks from the show.

Arturo Álvarez 

A lighting designer for over three decades, Arturo Álvarez has always stood out for his innovative use of tactile materials, evocative forms and ability to harness shadow as much as light. More recently, he has ditched commercial work to focus solely on handcrafted ‘illuminated sculptures’ for hospitality and cultural spaces, including Chipperfield’s RIA Foundation.

Attipico 

One of the refreshing and hopefully enduring aspects of the first edition of FORMA was discovering small and relatively unknown creative studios and names to watch. The studio-workshop Attipico presented a variety of chairs in different media and signed by various creators, from experiments in textiles to painted surfaces and sea-green tiles from the Andalusian clay covering experts Todobarro. 

Diffusions  by Il.lacions Gallery

The Barcelona-based Il.lacions Gallery has been a pioneer in presenting design as art, installation and solid investment in Spain. Its new platform Diffusions, debuted at FORMA, with a thoughtfully created display where narrative and high craftsmanship were intrinsic to each piece. Standouts included an exquisite alabaster lamp by Joshua Linacisoro and Jordi Iranzo’s ‘Breeze Chair.’

‘Before the Light’ by Mayice 

With handblown glass, handwoven silk and ingenious, barely-there engineering, the Madrid studio Mayice creates lighting and sculptural objects of the most exquisite beauty. As part of the off-site FORMA program, they took their pieces to the city’s historic Ateneo literary association,

Maison Parisienne + Simone Pheulpin 

All eyes were on the works of French textile sculptor Simone Pheulpin at the stand of Maison Parisienne, the artist’s representative. Now 86 years old, she presented her Eclosions sculptures and a new wall panel of fine textile fabric folded, pleated and moulded to appear like silky, sun-dried clay.

Bañon y Cotlin 

Among so much experimentation and innovation, it was comforting to be reminded of the luxury of noble materials, legacy and timeless forms. Studio Bañon, a master Madrid furniture studio dating from 1954, teamed with luxury textiles suppliers Cotlin for a sumptuous set-up of kid leather, plush velvet and curved cushion-y sofas and swivel chairs in deep terracotta red.

TodoMuta 

Born in Seville in 2011, Laura Molina and Sergio Herrera have been creating robust and futurist art pieces as turbo-charged as their studio’s name, which roughly translates to ‘in constant mutation.’  Metal, wood and marble are their materials of choice, paired to create tension between nature and human intervention. 

Hotusa + Massimiliano Moro

Also on the Diffusion platform, Italian light artist Massimiliano Moro presented ‘Asombrar’—a sculpture exhibition at the luxury Eurostars Madrid Tower Hotel. Moro’s work explores light and shadow as complementary elements. Here, shadows cast by the large windows of the hotel onto circles of saturated color became the focal point of the installation, and made the building’s vistas an active element of the show.