ANTIBODIES, a retrospective exhibition by the Campana brothers is at the Vitra Museum in Germany.
The Works of Fernando & Humberto Campana 1989 - 2009
A Vitra Design Museum exhibition, Weil am Rhein
'Til February 28, 2010
"Our work is about contamination: as much as the world contaminates ourselves, we want to contaminate the world." Humberto Campana.
Humberto Campana (born in 1953) and his brother Fernando (born in 1961) have worked together as furniture designers in São Paulo since 1989. Humberto came to the partnership as a self-taught artist with a degree in law while Fernando had been trained as an architect. The first joint work of this unequal pair – brutalistic, surrealistic furniture sculptures – caused a sensation in the São Paulo art scene right from the start. Over the past twenty years, they have established themselves among the most well-known and successful designers of our times, implementing their distinctive and individual language of objects in a tremendously wide-ranging oeuvre of furniture, lighting and installations that has been recognized in numerous publications and exhibitions such as at the Experimenta in Lisbon, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the London Design Museum.
Through a series of exceptionally successful seminars that the Campanas conducted for its summer workshop program, the Vitra Design Museum established a close relationship with the pair. This association provided the basis for the preparation of this major retrospective offering an overview of their most important works as well as their background. The exhibition highlights the characteristics of an oeuvre whose preoccupation with recycling, the melding of natural and artificial materials and the simultaneity of cultures sketches out a fascinating picture of our time. From the early days up to the present, their work has navigated a narrow path between design and pure art and spawned the most astonishing collages of objects and materials: "It’s a kind of flirt with the material which stands up asking: what can we be transformed into? The material dictates the form and the function in our work." Thus the exhibition devotes special attention to the Campanas’ working method, which is influenced by various sources of inspiration – the exuberant nature of Brazil’s primeval forests, the improvisations of street hawkers and the shacks of the slums, as well as film, music and fine art. The organization of their studio and the collaboration with external workshops as well as with international companies like Alessi, Edra or Vitra will be documented along with the interdisciplinary work on their latest projects. Along with this most comprehensive overview of their oeuvre to date, featuring a large number of prototypes, experiments and models being shown for the first time, the exhibition presents artworks by the Campanas as well as films, interviews and photos. In nine different groups, the exhibition highlights the formal variety of the works while always keeping the design process transparent.
If you have a chance to go, run because it's a must-see. The party organized during Art Basel was fantastically brazilian with caipirinhas and brazilian lounge music !Photographs are by Thomas Dix
To learn more: www.design-museum.de/index.php and http://www.campanas.com.br/
