This year, we will participate in Design Miami Basel with a solo of our female artist and designer Kiki van Eijk. Join us at booh C15!
Kiki’s world is whimsical and colorful, lyrical and personal, yet refined by a rigorous
attention to the process and skillful craftsmanship. Regardless of the scale of the work, the
handmade and human touch remains at the heart of her practice and reinforces an
intuitive and forward thinking approach to design in the 21st century.
Her wide range of sculptural work is inspired by the smallest details of the everyday and by a creative intuition that she is able to translate into pieces of strong visual autonomy.
Experimenting and researching materials is at the core of her twenty-two years long
practice of reinventing crafts. The curio exhibition exemplifies the richness of Kiki’s colorfulvisual universe. Mixing recognizable elements in unusual combinations, Kiki’s iconic vocabulary creates a visual feast of shapes, colors and materials; a layered world of textural objects in stoneware, mirror and bespoke textiles.
They are evocative pieces that use forms to tell domestic stories for herself and became
narratives for others.
Though referred mainly as a designer, her artistic practice moves between art, design and craft with joy and optimism. She is our contemporary Alice in Wonderland, wildly curious about the smallest details of life.
In ‘Kiki’s World’, there are no limits to the imagination, even size and scale can be
subverted for an element of surprise. As in a garden where seeds develop into seedlings, plants and fruit, Van Eijk’s work flows from her initial ideas to its development and each
step along the way is an essential part of the artistic process. Her generous spirit, her
interest in collaboration and the focus on community are reflected in the work she makes.
There is no distance between us and the object; we are welcomed to touch it and play with it.
‘In the complex interplay of unconscious and conscious processes, Kiki’s thinking hands
create the design’, writes curator Suzan Rüsseler, who recently curated a retrospective
exhibition of Van Eijk’s work at the TextielMuseum in Tilburg. She reflects on the
importance of craftsmanship and Van Eijk’s very tactile and hands-on approach to
creativity. It is part of her playful and experimental vision, but without casting aside the
necessities of precision, specialization and digital technologies, which can be involved in the process as well. ‘Thinking and executing flow into each other; the original idea is
adapted and refined during the process of making’, writes Rüsseler.
In our booth we present a selection of van Eijk's body of work that spans from furniture design to textiles to experimental art installations and works on paper.
For example, by using Rezzonico, an old Venetian glass technique applied to produce glass chandeliers, Kiki creates freeform shapes made from ceramic and LED lighting that use natural forms and repetitions.
Moreover, diving into her own extensive textile archives Kiki has been working with texture, patterns and fabrics composing textural evocative collages.
