SHIRO KURAMATA
06.21.17 04.10.18 Revolutionary Japanese Designer
An Exhibition at the Design Exchange Toronto
“more than anyone else before or since, kuramata could take the familiar and wrap it in strangeness, making it lyrical and sensuously beautiful�
- JOHN PAWSON
INTRODUCTION
SHIRO
KURAMATA
“Nevica Sempre Quando ti servo” (It always snow when you write)
黒 田 志 朗
Born in Tokyo in 1934, Kuramata grew up during World War II and the American Occupation of Japan. In 1953 he graduated from Tokyo polytechnic high school, where he studied woodcraft and went to work for a furniture company. Soon afterwards he enrolled at the Kuwasawa Design School in Tokyo. Kuramata’s approach to the composition of furniture and interiors revolutionized design in postwar Japan. Kuramata reassessed the relationship between form and function, imposing his own vision of surreal and minimalist ideals on everyday objects. During the 1970s and 80s, Kuramata, alert to the numerous possibilities of new technologies and industrial materials, turned to acrylic, glass, aluminum, and steel mesh to create objects that appear to break free of gravity into airy realms of transparency and lightness. He was inspired by Ettore Sottsass’s playful spirit and love of bright color and joined Sottsass’s collective, the design group ‘Memphis,’ at its founding in 1981. Kuramata’s furniture and interiors have been influential both in his native country and abroad; his works can be found in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Vitra Design Museum, Basel, Switzerland; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.
E. Sottsass
SHIRO KURAMATA
REVOLUTIONARY JAPANESE DESIGNER
GLASS CHAIR
With its’ purely immaterial and strictly rectangular form, the Glass Chair more than any other of Kuramata’s designs seems to pay homage to Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter and member of De Stijl and the modernist quest for dematerialization. The Glass Chair has purity. It transcends the material and visible world and exists somewhere between being and not being. Though functional, the chair seems too fragile, too miraculous and too transcendental to carry a worldly, human body. The resultant chair, with no need for screws or mounts, has a miraculous appearance - it gives the illusion of being of supported by thin air. However, it was the result of repeated testing, and setbacks along the way. Kuramata seems to have discovered by personal trial that the new wonder adhesive was not initially as long lasting as hoped. However, even in mishap, the artist in him found consolation. It may be that the chair will abruptly fall into pieces, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Glass gives one the sensation of looking at the past when it smashes but looking at a well-polished surface gives us a glimpse of the future.
1976 “his works are beautiful conceptually, but they also have a very tender quality” - Tadao Ando
EXPERIENCE DESIGN
SHIRO KURAMATA
Named after an old jazz song, How High the Moon carries one of the most poetic titles of Kuramata’s works, and it nurtures readings as suggestive as its dim, curved contours. How High the Moon resembles a sofa made of air, and thus illustrates another example of Kuramata’s attempt to defy gravity by working in transparent materials. The visual effect of the three dimensional pattern of the mesh is vibrating and blurs the outlines of the sofa bringing it to the edge of visibility. The voluminous body is playfully contradicted by its lightness in materials. It is big yet it floats gracefully.
Laputa, titled after the name of the flying island in the fantasy novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, is a double bed, for two people lying down in a line, head to head or feet against feet. This bed, with refined forms, whose design recalls hospital beds, also gives a wink to Marcel Duchamp, an artist so admired by Kuramata, and especially to his work, Apolinère Enameled, created from an advert representing a little girl painting her bed. Made from anodised aluminium, characterised by the bright colours of the bed-head, the bed conjours up, according to the words of Kuramata himself, feelings of floating, of sliding into the beyond of dreams. Created in acrylic resin, glass and aluminium, the vases for a single flower Ephemera pay homage to the Japanese tradition of flower arranging. Their linear elegance responds to the silhouette of the Laputa bed, and they are often associated with it.
1991
HOW HIGH THE MOON & LAPUTA
1986
SHIRO KURAMATA
REVOLUTIONARY JAPANESE DESIGNER
MISS BLANCHE
1988
Created in 1988, the chair, introduces a new era in Kuramata’s design linked to his discovery of the aesthetic potentials of acrylic and his exploration of combining acrylic with other materials especially aluminium with stained allumite finish - and in the case of Miss Blanche, the plastic roses. Miss Blanche beautifully personifies the poetic nature of Kuramata’s works. The wonder and paradox of life. The chair seems so effortless, the product of almost nothing. There is no structure, no elaborate fixing. The anodized tubular aluminium legs are screwed into a socket in the acrylic, in the way that had originally been devised for the acrylic pieces that Kuramata was working on in 1960. But of course it is exactly the kind of effortlessness that was so demanding to achieve. Liquid acrylic is like water, and needs the addition of just the right amount of hardening agent, a procedure that requires considerable skill. Working by trial and error, the team hit on a method of pouring acrylic to half the depth of the mould, putting in the flowers, waiting eight hours for the acrylic to go hard, then pouring in the rest to the top of the mould, and waiting another eight hours.
EXPERIENCE DESIGN
SHIRO KURAMATA
“Red flowers of love have been entombed in acrylic, reflecting an image of eternity, eternally floating and eternally reminding us of both the passing of time and the constancy of time.” - Paul Hughes
SHIRO KURAMATA
REVOLUTIONARY JAPANESE DESIGNER
BIOGRAPHY
“My strongest desire is to be free of gravity, free of bondage. I want to float”
Kuramata’s works are imbued with traces of the old story of Western fascination of Japanese decorative arts and crafts over hundred years ago with, and later in the 20th century the early modernist hunger for Japanese simplicity and structural purity that strongly influenced the functionalistic dogma form follows function. Most importantly, are the stories that the pieces themselves reveal to us today. One continuous thread that runs through these stories is that of dematerialization. My strongest desire is to be free of gravity, free of bondage. I want to float, said Kuramata, and this approach imbues his work aim with a kind of spiritual search. Kuramata’s attempts to defy gravity find formal expressions in transparent materials as glass, acrylic and expanded steel mesh, and in experimenting with incorporating light. In these materials he explores boundaries between lightness and gravity, and between the material and the immaterial; these boundaries vibrate in his design and produce a quiet
EXPERIENCE DESIGN
SHIRO KURAMATA
FLOWER VASE #1 & #2
SHIRO KURAMATA
REVOLUTIONARY JAPANESE DESIGNER
With its’ purely immaterial and strictly rectangular form, the Glass Chair more than any other of Kuramata’s designs seems to pay homage to Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter and member of De Stijl and the modernist quest for dematerialization. The Glass Chair has purity. It transcends the material and visible world and exists somewhere between being and not being. Though functional, the chair seems too fragile, too miraculous and too transcendental to carry a worldly, human body. The resultant chair, with no need for screws or mounts, has a miraculous appearance - it gives the illusion of being of supported by thin air. Kuramata seems to have discovered by personal trial that the new wonder adhesive was not initially as long lasting as hoped. However, even in mishap, the artist in him found consolation. It may be that the chair will abruptly fall into pieces, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Glass gives one the sensation of looking at the past when it smashes but looking at a well-polished surface gives us a glimpse of the future.
1989
EXPERIENCE DESIGN
SHIRO KURAMATA
1969
LUMINOUS TABLE
The dual functional Luminous Table (made of milk-white acrylic lit from within) shows Kuramata’s fascination with light as a material that both literally and figuratively adds a new dimension to conventional objects such as a table or a chair. While the shape of the table emphasis the purity of the essential table form, there is a uniqueness that emanates from Kurarmata’s handling that draws attention to the beauty of an everyday item.
D E SI G N E D B Y S I E RR A D A T R I
https:// www.
shiro
kuramata
.com