MAM Shanghai is delighted to announce its new exhibition, “Memphis Once more”, which opens on 14 Might and runs till 30 July.
The exhibition will deliver the colorful, post-modern designs of the famend Memphis Group to MAM Shanghai and recreate the thrill and enthusiasm of their work from the mid-Eighties by way of paintings, objects and music of the period.
The exhibition, which involves China from Milan, Italy, incorporates practically 200 of essentially the most iconic items of furnishings and objects created by the Memphis Group of designers, artists and designers between 1981 and 1985.
Beneath the management of Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass, the Memphis Group was united by a want to create vibrant, non-conformist and summary designs as an antidote to the tasteless, corporatised furnishings of the period. With components of Artwork Deco, Pop Artwork and Nineteen Fifties kitsch, the designs have been radical in comparison with the minimalist designs of the time.
Named after Bob Dylan’s monitor “Caught Within Cellular with the Memphis Blues Once more” which had been enjoying within the background throughout their first assembly, the Memphis Group quickly attracted a preferred following, with early champions together with David Bowie and Karl Lagerfeld, in addition to inspiring the look of tv exhibits and product designs.
Guests to the exhibition will discover themselves immersed within the sturdy, visible photos of the period which can make them the celebs of their very personal Memphis-inspired style present, set to the backdrop of music specifically created by the American DJ Seth Troxler.
The MAM Shanghai exhibition corridor itself shall be reworked right into a Memphis psychedelic membership. Insights from critics, architects, and designers shall be projected on the partitions and interspersed among the many works, providing viewers a particular perspective on how this cultural motion marked a brand new period in Italian and even world design manufacturing.
Guests shall be taken again in time to that first gathering of designers within the house of Ettore Sottsass and Barbara Radice, enjoying Bob Dylan music, to the primary Memphis assortment in 1981 on the Salone del Cellular in Milan, to its affect on Bowie, Lagerfeld and others.
“Memphis Once more” isn’t a tribute, nor does it try and deify these extraordinary works. The aim of the exhibition is similar as when the motion was launched in 1981 — to deal with the expressive energy and cultural chance of design itself.
Memphis inherently aspires to shelve the language of design and structure in favour of one other design mission: to examine emphasising emotional, psychological, problem-aware, and disciplinary identities whereas addressing purposeful functions. Sottsass himself wished his designs to impress and stimulate conversations, believing that it was extra necessary to speak concepts than to mass-produce objects.
“A superb design is like the potential for going to the moon,” he wrote. “Few folks may have the chance to expertise it immediately, however its existence will change the lives of hundreds of thousands.”
Shai Baitel, inventive director of MAM Shanghai, says: “Memphis was greater than only a set of radical objects — it was additionally designed with a religious philosophy in thoughts. The distinction that the work of Memphis presents to the staid, smooth object design of Minimalism and Modernism is marked, and has a lot to do with its utilisation of decoration — an aesthetic antagonist of the worldwide hipster design fashion that’s so prevalent at the moment. David Bowie, a well-known early consumer of the group, described “the jolt, the influence, created by strolling right into a room containing a cupboard by Memphis.”
He provides: “Memphis cupboards — flagship objects of the furnishings group — have been certainly a shift from the tender traces, glass, and muted colors of a lot late Modernist Seventies design. Horizontal and diagonal shelving, constructed as if taken immediately from an imaginative designer’s sketchbook, creates a peculiar, versatile construction of various angles to cradle books or artwork objects. Contrasting the construction is the faux-terrazzo vinyl end, bridging excessive — and low-brow design in an progressive, daring gesture, printed in each muted and flashy color schemes. These objects, present in a liminal area between artwork, design, and one thing alien, really feel directly bespoke and unknowable. ’
MAM Shanghai is the most important up to date artwork museum in Shanghai, measuring over 7,000 sq. meters. The cutting-edge museum positioned on the coronary heart of Shanghai ’ s cultural mile alongside the Huangpu River is a premier establishment for up to date artwork with a world and multidisciplinary method.
Memphis Once more shall be at MAM Shanghai between 14 Might and 30 July.
