NEW YORK, NY.- Phillips de Pury & Company announced the début of the New York retail shop at the flagship 450 Park Avenue galleries. The curated program reflects Phillips de Pury & Company’s expertise in design, contemporary art, photography, editions, and jewelry, and exemplifies Phillips de Pury’s role as today’s contemporary arts arbiter.
London based design studio, Glass Hill (Markus Bergström & Joe Nunn) was commissioned to design the space and has devised an intelligent, modular, system that allows for flexibility and reinvention while adhering to the simple, linear values for which the studio is renowned. The result provides a dynamic platform for Phillips de Pury to exhibit and sell the work of today’s leading designers and artists.
The shop features work from three nominees for this year’s Brit Insurance Design Awards; Seongyong Lee and Nendo in the best furniture design category and Max Lamb for J&L Lobmeyr in the best Product Design Category. Lee’s Plytube series, a rift on traditional cardboard tubing, innovated both a new architectural material and language of joinery. Nendo’s Thin Black Lines series, first exhibited in 2010 at Phillips de Pury in London’s Saatchi Gallery, is a poetic homage to Japanese calligraphy and it’s representation of condensed meaning. Lamb’s Quarz glasses produced by J. & L. Lobmeyr reference the perfect hexagonal structures that form when a quartz crystal’s growth is uninhibited.
Other notable works include: Ara Peterson‘s Untitled Backgammon boards, 2008, a collaboration with his father Jack Peterson, which interpret one of the oldest board games through abstract designs that energetically connect the player with Peterson’s optical, mosaic kaleidoscopic forms in geometric repetitive patterns. Martino Gamper’s Arnold Circus Stool was part of the regeneration project for Arnold Circus, London’s first council housing project situated in the heart of Shoreditch. The stool is used as the official seating for annual events including circus picnics, concerts, tournaments and festivals. Humans Since 1982 (Bastian Bischoff and Per Emanuelsson) brilliantly recontextualize time with Clock Clock, Sweden 2010 and intelligently confront sociopolitical ideals with Hair clip on hair, 2010. Clock Clock was first exhibited at the Röhsska Design Museum, Gotheburg in 2009 and commercially debuted in Phillips de Pury’s Connectors exhibition, London 2010. The piece consists of 24 analogue clocks stacked vertically and horizontally such that the hands can align in order to communicate a single time in a digital format. Hair clip on hair is an edition of 50 photographic hairclips that are hand-mounted, signed, and accompanied by a special passepartout, which symbolically secures universal access and entry. The work illustrates an iconic portrayal of masked eyes deeply rooted in current social commentary and cultural codes.
