VOLUME VS. VOID

Marion Friedmann Gallery presents 4 artists working on the intersection of design and sculpture. For VOLUME VS VOID, we selected sculptural and design works that play with the notion of volume, void and space. Volume has the power to influence void in a physical, as well as in our emotional ‘self’-space. Volume enhances the perception of space. Volume delivers objects that give pleasure in a void we might experience in such challenging times, like ours.

As soon as such a surprising object as Gisela Stiegler’s ‘Columns’ engage with space, it completely changes. Jorge Yázpik’s sculptures famously play with volume and negative space within the piece itself. As one of the most important contemporary artists of Mexico today, Yázpik carves his stone sculptures having the duality of volume and void in mind.

Julio Martínez Barnetche presents light-sculptures: a technical brass and wood structure holds a beautifully carved quartz and amber piece and lets them dance in the air to create flickering shadows through the light source directed at it. Thierry Jeannot presents two lamps from his recent Transmutation collection, where star shaped chandeliers illuminate our shperes like satellites. His light fixtures are pieces of art, where plastic waste is the principal protagonist.

Marion Friedmann Gallery London launched in 2011 and merges a penchant for the avant-garde with a passion to celebrate and promote the most remarkable emerging and established contemporary designers. The media acclaimed show “Enlightened Waste” marked the beginning of the gallery’s trajectory as an ambassador for international design with an established focus on Mexico and Latin America. Her featured talents were brought to the spotlight in gallery exhibitions between London, Austria, Milan & Mexico City, and in a blockbuster exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York.

The gallery represents vanguard limited edition design with a passion for material culture, remarkable raw materials & techniques, unique ideas, artisan-designer collaborations, contemporary craft, sustainable thinking & social design. The gallery has been on the forefront of discovering talents and nourishing cross-cultural exchange & knowledge transfer ever since its inception.

Marion Friedmann Gallery (London)
Marion Friedmann, director
Belsize Road, London NW6 4 DT UK
www.marionfriedmann.com
@marionfriedmann

Gisela Stiegler lives and works as an artist in Vienna. She holds an MA from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, a degree in Photography from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

In her work, Stiegler refers to movements within art-history and examines at how they can be envisioned today (e.g. carving techniques from an old Austrian rural tradition or opulent baroque carving). Within her sculptural body of work Gisela Stiegler has been exploring and carving expanded polystyrene for more than ten years as her main raw material to work with. Over those years she has been developing a fascinating evolution and perfection of her technique and the treatment of this delicate and cutting edge contemporary material.

She has also created an acclaimed series of lamps from recycled fish-boxes which she finely carves and lacquers. Her lamps are ready, closed and finished objects, whereas her other sculptural work pleads for further work and experiment. The pieces are lacquered in silver, white, blue, steal or bronze. This is when the pieces enter into conversation with the ‘other’. They become another kind and fake a long gone time as well as another material and weight, appearing like architecture or monoliths, however alive. Since 2020 Stiegler casts some of her sculptures in artificial marble.

Jorge Yázpik is one of the most renowned contemporary Méxican artists. He works in large and small scale abstract sculpture with a wide range of precious and semi-precious stones. Yázpik approaches stone and raw materials with a high respect to their natural qualities, opportunities and limitations. Often Jade and Obsidian for example are presented in an unpolished glory, displaying their crystal appeal through carefully placed cuts. Every discourse with the material happens  - in Yázpik’s own words- by “clearing the path”, making space for the accidental element. He incorporates a strong architectural design language within his oevre. Yázpik was mentored by Mexican ‘Ruptura’ artist Manuel Felguerez, a pioneer in Méxican Geometrism.

Yázpik's work has been featured internationally in solo and collective exhibitions, including the Museo Soumaya, Museo de Arte Moderno, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Museo Diego Rivera (Anahuacalli) and Casa Barragán in Mexico City, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Cali (Colombia), the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Montevideo (Uruguay), the Petit Palais in Paris (France), the 2000 Expo Hannover (Germany) and the 2015 Expo Milano (Italy).

Julio Martínez Barnetche is a Méxican stone sculptor and designer working precious and semiprecious stones. His oeuvre entails not only sculpture, but also furniture in special wood, stone and metal combinations, jewellery, as well as tableware and cooking devices in volcanic stone. Martínez Barnetche works precious and semi-precious stones, wood and metals, moving easily between pure sculpture, furniture and objects. He often takes his materials as he encounters them naturally. In the case of the wood, he finds it in nature, in the garden of friends or from architectural salvage sites. In some pieces handcrafted forgery is applied. This is where the artist explores the target, the piece's final destination. One piece for example became a small side table, reminiscent of a heart.

His sculptures are a discourse through shape, space and the volume intertwined with a sensitive beauty. They combine science and art. His works reflect a deep conversation with the stones and their scientific properties. The artist has accumulated a thorough expertise of the material he makes his own through the carving and design process. In the artist’s own words: “The aesthetic marriage of materials is forever a dance between tension and harmony, permanent and transient and soft and hard”.

Thierry Jeannot is a French-born designer living in Mexico for the last 20 years. Working across product design, furniture and social design, his focus generates high added value to recycled materials through design. He is interested in traditional techniques and materials and has worked closely with crafts-people both in Paris (back in the 80ies with fashion guru Thierry Mugler) and later with the workshops he discovered in Mexico City. He follows a design philosophy where design and the production process are never separated. In the 1980s he began working with a range of unconventional or ‘outlandish’ materials, like for example acrylics and plastics. For the last ten years he has been working mainly with the PET bottle as his raw-material. He explores various techniques of using the bottle and to transform its materiality and status to favourable acclaim both in Mexico and the United States.