DesignArt: First Impressions

LONDON—Patrick Perrin, the 18th century French furniture dealer and fair organizer who premiered DesignArt London, was pleased with the results even before the fair began. “Twenty dealers this year, all we could fit into the Hanover Square tent, will be 40 dealers next year in Berkeley Square,” he told me at the preview.

The Brits are relatively new entrants into the fast-developing field, as was obvious by the crowd on opening night, when it seemed that European and American collectors rushing down the road from Zoo outnumbered the Brit brigade two-to-one. DesignArt may well change all this.

The fair—London’s first devoted to modern and contemporary furniture and decorative arts—is as schizophrenic as the field; the classic 20th century designs that have now become icons (including lots of Scandinavian 1950s wood plus the best post-l980s designers) jostled for attention with 21st century design art. With some exceptions, the 21st century won.

Gallerist David Gill is the godfather of design art in London, and his resolutely 21st century stand was a highlight of the fair. Works by star architects shone brightly, including Zaha Hadid’s magestic Dune Table and Nigel Coates’s Tryst series of biomorphic tables and chairs. Also competing for attention were surrealist exercises in upholstery by Fredrickson Stallard (with whom Gill has been working for some 20 years) and Barnaby Barford’s sinister kitsch porcelains.

Also outstanding was the Contrasts Gallery’s stand, helmed by the ebullient Pearl Lam, who like Gill, is a long-time patron and proponent of contemporary design art, with galleries in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. Here work by Mattia Bonetti and Andre Dubreuil contrasted with superb eight-foot porcelain vases by Peter Ting and WOKmedia’s blanc de chine furniture for children. Classical Chinese contemporary design art was represented by Shao Fan’s deconstructed Ming chairs, in which the classical forms are manipulated with wood or Perspex. And XYZ Design’s counterfeit handbag chairs (baroque chairs patchworked in fake-label handbag fragments) exhibited a playfulness perhaps lacking in the rest of the fair.

London-based Carpenters Workshop Gallery, which has a roster of post-1980s designers, put the 21st century generation center stage. Of special interest was Jeroen Verhoeven’s curvilinear wood Cinderella table, his graduation piece from Design Academy Eindhoven. The emerging star is also producing new work for the gallery under the auspices of Demakersvan, the design house he runs with Judith de Graauw and his twin brother, Joep, in Rottersdam. Vincent Dubourg’s Napolean a Trotinette table was a wild 21st century baroque fantasy directly descended from earlier work by Dubreuil.

New York’s R20th Century Gallery featured Wendell Castle, presenting the first U.K. solo showing of the legend’s magical work. Original vintage examples in wood and plastic from the 1960s and 1970s contrasted with new groundbreaking plastic designs and the international debut of a re-edition from Castle’s 1968 exhibition of sculptural lighting prototypes. Cloud Shelf, Swivel Coffee Table, and Big Table edited in black or white were absolutely timeless—neither 20th nor 21st century. As Castle rightly says, biomorphic forms “have their own vigorous life.”