LONDON.- Phillips de Pury & Company presents the first UK solo exhibition of Japanese design studio, Nendo. The exhibition is presented simultaneously in two parts and in two spaces—at Phillips de Pury & Company’s London headquarters at Howick Place and at Saatchi Gallery.
Blurry White Surfaces at Howick Place is a retrospective of major earlier works including cord-chair and fadeout-chair. Thin Black Lines, on view at Saatchi Gallery, presents twenty-nine new designs executed in steel.
Blurry White Surfaces is composed primarily of work shown in the ‘ghost stories’ solo show that toured New York and Milan. The show brought together pieces that explored unusual techniques and materials and manipulated textures as a way of creating ambiguous objects with an eerily faint presence—objects that seem to appear, disappear, and reappear.
‘Outlines’ are the theme of Thin Black Lines. Slight black lines like the traces of sketches make transparent surfaces and volumes appear, which are assigned practical functions. They are expressions of condensed meaning, similar to Japanese calligraphy, with its simplification of plant and animal imagery into outlines.
The designs gently break the relationship of before and behind, and traverse the space between two and three dimensions. Multi-faceted and constantly morphing, they alternate between the creation and collapse of form.
A book with an essay by design historian and Japan specialist, Dr. Sarah Teasley of the Royal College of Art will be published and available during the exhibition.
Oki Sato opened his multi-disciple design studio, Nendo (Japanese for clay), in 2002, the same year he received his M.A. in architecture from Waseda University, Tokyo. Despite the studio’s young life they have been prolific, completing an astonishing number of remarkable projects in architecture, interior, product and graphic design. Nendo’s watershed, two-part “Ghost Stories” exhibition at Friedman Benda Gallery and New York’s Museum of Arts & Design in 2009 was embraced by both critics and collectors.
