Colour maven Hella Jongerius has continued her experiments with hues and palettes - this time for an exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, commonly known as MAK.
For its 150th anniversary, MAK gave nine designers and curators a dream commission: imagine what an exemplary collection for today and tomorrow would look like. For his contribution to the show, Exemplary: 150 Years of the MAK - from Arts and Crafts to Design, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery Hans Ulrich Obrist worked with his muse, design critic Alice Rawsthorn. The pair paid the favour forward and asked various designers, including Jongerius, to pursue an unrealised project of their choice from their own portfolios.
For her section of the exhibition, Jongerius experiments with traditional paint recipes and industrially produced colour samples. She mixes and combines hues in images of vases painted onto canvas to create new families of colour. Using the medium of painting allows her experiments to evoke a richer response.
When I take the changing nuances of colour and apply them to fabric, I leave room for viewers to arrive at personal interpretations, says Jongerius.
By consciously drawing on painting as a source of inspiration, Jongerius searches for possibilities in colours and materials, not in order to create a new colour palette but to engage users with the beauty of her never-ending investigation.
Exemplary is showcased at MAK exhibition hall in Vienna until 5 October 2014. Other creative pioneers curating parts of the exhibition are Jan Boelen, Hilary Cottam, Lidewij Edelkoort, Konstantin Grcic, Gesche Joost, Fiona Raby, and Tony Dunne, Stefan Sagmeister and Sabine Seymour,
