Sorcha Dallas

‘Aesthetics at War with Enigma’ is the way in which Jean-Michel Frank described his eccentric interiors and décor. In the 1930s he was already using unorthodox materials and unusual combinations – his wall panellings with ray and shark skin and decors of fan-shaped drawers, lending his rooms a sophisticated golden shimmer, became famous. In Frank’s boutique in Faubourg Saint-Honore the visitor steps into a mysterious world of furniture with antique patterning and features such as doors that open like the entrance to a Pharaoh’s tomb, lamps and vases, designed by the Giacometti brothers with their peculiar mix of classicism and surrealism and paintings by Christian Berard, which, in their contradiction of poetic functionalism appeared like part of the interior of a sacred room of the early renaissance period. In the office above the plain desk you saw a simple blackboard hung on extravagant wood panelling on which someone had scribbled an order reminiscent of a line from Proust’s lost time: ‘Envoyer las parapluie a Lady Mendi verndredi soir ou plustard’. The blackboard hangs by a cord, tied around the wrist of a plaster hand, coming out of the wall and with the fingertips holding a goblet shaped lamp shade, emitting delicate light.

Later we meet this almost literary-artistic style in interior design again with Carlo Mollino in the 1950s. The designer, known for his ‘Turin Baroque’ did not shy away from combining the most bizarre elements; furniture that is much more than just objects, that are not subdued to pragmatism but are artistic objects on the brink of biting humour and unsurpassable elegance sharing our lives and at the same time building a sphere – an almost animated intermediate space of materialized attitudes.

By the end of the 1970s the Memphis Group eventually pushed the ideas of eclecticism and deconstruction of design history to the limits. Their designs were anarchic in their entire disrespectfulness towards categories such as quality and sophistication. Memphis turned this clash of form and material into a fetish and made the principle, sometimes, into a harmless and highly overworked bad-taste-design. For many years nobody wanted to see or hear anything of Memphis anymore. But lately sine artists and designers have started to pursue the traces of this chapter again.

We asked Berlin based artists Nairy Baghramian and Julian Gothe to jointly develop a new interior for the foyer of the Kunsthalle Basel. The foyer, which is now more spacious than before, includes as a communicative meeting point the box office and the bookshops of the Kunsthalle and the Architekturmuseum. Based on the function of the foyer the artists have decided on a range of furniture which builds an independent and closed aesthetical unity that is absolute but which still – if confronted with each other in one room – would display an unexpected interplay. In both book-tables you find shapes reminiscent of museum of sacred interiors of the 19th Century. Both twin desks for the box office and the small side table for the reading lounge are abstractly shaped and appear almost graphical in their uneven black and white patterns. The lounge has been arranged with objects displaying various design historical cross-overs and new realisations. Nairy Baghramian and Julian Gothe have both work ed artistically in their own unique ways on the threshold of sculpture and furniture before. For the foyer of the Kunsthalle Basel they have focused on the spatial and functional conditions and developed an overall concept, combining a whole range of ideas that are aesthetically sometimes subtle and sometimes very boldly realised. The institutional space of the foyer has now been transformed through individual ideas of interior design into public décor.