Presented at the Vitra Design Museum Gallery in Weil am Rhein, Germany, the ‘Album’ exhibition by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. The main focus of the exhibition is on their drawings, in addition to archive photographs of models and projects that all come together to offer a panorama of their work, extending from everyday details to a global approach. The exhibition was launched February 3rd and is up until June 3rd. More information after the break.
On one hand, the drawings of the Bouroullecs are works of independent artistic value, whose tender, often crosshatched and at times almost naïve-seeming pictorial motifs create their own unique world of forms. On the other hand, they act as important steps within the design process to gradually move toward the ultimate proposal of a new object. The designers proceed like natural scientists who investigate and continually retest the forms of their own array of ideas with a spirit of curiosity. Inspired by this approach, the exhibition stages the objects in a manner reminiscent of a natural history museum or a laboratory.
The exhibition “Album” shows that the work of today’s designers is a complex process in which numerous structural and technical problems must be solved. Yet even in the age of computers, drawing remains an indispensable tool for many designers, as it makes it possible to capture spontaneous, sometimes unexpected design ideas on paper and to develop an individual formal language. In so doing, the exhibition emphasizes the significance drawing has always had for the conception of objects – from da Vinci to Le Corbusier. The very word “design” can be traced back to the Italian term “disegno”, which was used in the Renaissance to refer to the sketching out of a pictorial motif.
The exhibition “Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec – Album” constitutes the inaugural presentation of the works of the designer brothers in a museum context within the German-speaking world. A comprehensive exhibition of the oeuvre of Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec is being simultaneously shown through 30 July at Centre Pompidou – Metz. The exhibition also includes “Cercles”, an iPad application, which provides an interactive expansion of the exhibition material as a digital catalogue.
“Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec – Album” is a cooperation of Vitra Design Museum and arc en rêve center d’architecture, Bordeaux. For more information on the event, please visit here.
