Design, architecture, fashion, art... the Mäder DesignLab brings you the latest news and trends. Sources of inspiration and artistic favorites, the DesignLab team reveals the secrets of its creativity, enabling it to develop singular colors, materials and finishes, always at the cutting edge of trends.
For this fifth edition, our design team headed to the Fondation Louis Vuitton for an inspiring exhibition! After a highly successful exhibition in 2018 on American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Foundation continues its exploration of Basquiat's work, this time revealing his collaboration with artist Andy Warhol.
To bear witness to this explosive exhibition, both in terms of meaning and the physical impact of strong, very large-format canvases in gallery space, the angle of a palimpsest of signs & colors, made possible by the strength of the pairing, is essential.
A palimpsest is a manuscript made up of previously used parchment, whose inscriptions have been removed so that it can be written on again. By extension, the term "palimpsest" is sometimes used to describe an object that is built up by successive destruction and reconstruction, while retaining the history of earlier traces. Figuratively speaking, it's a psychological mechanism by which new impressions and feelings replace and obliterate previous ones.
Here, silkscreen, the art of multiplication, rubs shoulders with painting and its unique gesture, like so many layers, superimpositions and actions of the artists.
"Andy would start most of the paintings. He'd put on something very recognizable, a brand logo, and somehow I'd disfigure it. Then I'd try to get him to come back, I wanted him to paint again." Jean-Michel Basquiat
"I draw first, and then I paint like Jean-Michel. I think the paintings we do together are better when you don't know who did what." Andy Warhol
Witnessing their friendshiṕ and collaboration, Keith HARING, American artist and draughtsman speaks of a "conversation happening through paint, instead of words" and of two minds merging to create a "third, separate and unique" one.
Such is the strength of pairings: their real asset lies in the creation of a third skill more powerful than the individual ones. And it's this fusion, with its perfect compositions, that strikes us.
To extend the experience, the "Basquiat Soundtracks" exhibition at the Philharmonie de Paris recreates the musical universe in which Jean-Michel Basquiat, musician, painter and producer, worked. The soundtrack that accompanies the tour plunges us into the creative ferment of the time, between Jazz, Beethoven, New Wave and Hip-hop; an eclecticism where different art forms intersect to better influence each other.