Art, Design and Nature Converge at Chuck Moffit’s Upcoming Flora-Inspired Show at Eric Buterbaugh Gallery
With a natural acuity for challenging conventional impressions of art and design through his previous collaborations with the Hammer Museum, OBJCT Gallery, and the Torrance Museum of Art, Los Angeles-based artist and furniture designer Chuck Moffit is back later this month with a solo exhibition that marries contemporary design, and flora and olfactory elements into a sculptural five-piece collection of evocative metalworks.
Chuck Moffit’s with the Promise of Nectar opens August 25th at Eric Buterbaugh Gallery, a project space in Los Angeles known for embracing makers who artfully manipulate and embrace flora and scent. “The setting at Eric’s gallery gave me a chance to assemble a tableau bringing together my known elements—steel and cast bronze; brutalist and geometric aesthetics—to mingle with the unseen,” said Moffit. “Scent has the most powerful connection to memory and we are always surprised by its strength.”
Using the gallery’s namesake floral designer and perfumer’s body of work as inspiration, Moffit crafted a quintet of sculptural chairs, tables and lighting that embody the ethereal nature of a fragrant, open meadow. Exploring diverging aesthetics of the visible and invisible, and the concrete and the abstract, with the Promise of Nectar creates a complex intersection between art, design and nature.
“Chuck’s vision for a meadow lead to Eric integrating elements of the pastoral into the gallery,” says Maddie Phinney, Director of Eric Buterbaugh Gallery. “In his land of splendor, miniature bud vases blossom like wildflowers, directly from concrete.”
Each piece, from Dioscuri, a steel and velvet-lined tête-à-tête chair, to Tiberinus, a cast glass, bronze, and patinated steel coffee table, invokes pure romanticism through a clever juxtaposition between the raw beauty of Buterbaugh’s floral design and weightless fragrances, and the robust tactility of Moffit’s furniture and lighting.
“with the Promise of Nectar” opens August 25 at Eric Buterbaugh Gallery in collaboration with Blackman Cruz, 8271 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, through September 11, 2016.
