Dutch Invertuals Exhibits Personal Curios From 45 Designers
These are a few of their favorite things: 45 participants displayed 800 curios from their personal archives alongside new work at “Fundamentals,” an exhibition launched during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. It was the vision of Wendy Plomp, founder of Dutch Invertuals (the name derives from inverse, a reference to the collective’s radical perspective), who has produced 18 shows focused on innovative Dutch design over the past nine years. This one was a snapshot into the life and output of the emerging and the established.
Daphna Laurens founders Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf and Laurens Manders designed the exhibition, neatly arranging objects the designers had squirrelled away in their studios on a 50-foot-diameter wooden donut shape. There were woven loafers, a volcanic stone, a hand broom, and even a shuttlecock. “It was a reflection of their identities,” Plomp recalls. Then an outer ring presented each of those designers’ new work. Standouts included a vaultlike box in MDF and bamboo by Paul Heijnen Studio, a cube of crushed gravel by Core Studio co-founder Tijs Gilde, Léa Baert’s brass-handled limestone vessel, and recent Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Thomas Ballouhey’s wooden side table, its teal glue-and-sand finish applied via a jury-rigged sandblaster.
To promote the show, guest curators Christoph Brach and Daniera ter Haar of graphics studio Raw Color created a photography campaign featuring anthropomorphic totems of the personal objects.
