PREVIEW

FENONEM IKEA

A show with 250 exhibits, including IKEA products spanning six decades, design classics by Thonet, Panton, Henningsen and others, 25 art works of international artists and designers about IKEA and the famous Frankfurt kitchen from 1926.

Visit and discuss in the blog www.fenomenikea.de

Beautiful and practical products for everybody! This idea is almost as old as the industrial fabrication of furniture and interior decoration itself. The furniture manufactory IKEA founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad held up this ideal from the very beginning. The huge success and international reach of the biggest brand name in furniture worldwide is the motive for the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe to investigate how far the furnishing company has been successful in realising the promise inherent in the idea of “Democratic Design for everyone” propagated by the Deutsche Werkbund, the Bauhaus and their successors. FENOMEN IKEA shows some 250 exhibits, including IKEA products spanning six decades as well as many examples of mass-produced goods and high-quality product design which were made long before IKEA and apart from it, such as design classics by Thonet, Panton, Henningsen and others, or the famous Frankfurt kitchen from the year 1926 and the most commonly found German living room in 2009. NON IKEA is the name of a special section within the exhibition devoted to the reactions of international artists such as Thomas Schütte, Tobias Rehberger, Morten Steen Hebsgaard and others as well as designers to the phenomenon IKEA.

FENOMEN IKEA deals with the complex field of mass production and quality, globality and national tastes, individual habits and quality of life, fashions in living and advertising, and asks questions such as: does IKEA offer good design? Where does IKEA get its ideas from? Is IKEA typically Swedish? Can living quarters be organized? Does living in a good environment mean that you live a good life? Is there such a thing as a collective IKEA experience? The focus here is on the early IKEA products from the Fifties and Sixties, the classics from the Seventies and Eighties and numerous objects from the experimental and individualistic “PS Kollektion” which IKEA presented in 1995 in Milan as a set of design ideas intended as a signal against exclusive and expensive products. They are contrasted with exemplary classic items by Michael Thonet, Verner Panton, Poul Henningsen and other designers, which seem comparable at first sight, but are in fact totally different. This will help to reveal the sources of inspiration, the ideas developed further, the decisions on material and product, which underlie the specific designs of IKEA products.

In the exhibition, the confrontation between the design objects will be complemented by further core aspects which go to make up the collective experience of the cult brand IKEA: communication – Scandinavian modernism and Swedish folklore; the vision of an organizable living environment, already conceived by the Deutsche Werkbund, the Bauhaus or Gute Form; practical everyday living – modular design and Do-it-yourself; living with IKEA – the role of children and the family as customers; IKEA and the consequences for design, art and humour and the exchange of experiences with other “IKEAns“. Any time. All over the world.

NON IKEA is the name of a special section within FENOMEN IKEA which brings together some 25 works of art and design objects by international designers and artists. These objects take up the concepts, materials and products of IKEA and create something completely new out of them: taking aesthetic principles to extremes, introducing new functions, alienating the designs to make them subversive and provocative. Thus,

for instance, the most important instrument of IKEA marketing, the catalogue which appears annually, is the starting point for two artists: Jason Salavon deconstructs the IKEA catalogue by making the text and the products disappear – leaving pure colour arrangements reminiscent of Mondrian, De Stijl or contemporary graphic design. Sebastian Vonderau uses the IKEA catalogue as a drawing pattern to create an animated film which generates the outlines of IKEA products which are continuously overlaid by lines and colours resulting in a dense structure which changes them out of recognition. Morten Steen Hebsgaard plays with the relationship between highbrow culture and cheap mass design in his reproductions or new interpretations of well-known works of art created from IKEA materials.

The lively and interactive exhibition will be accompanied by an audiovisual introduction, an audio guide, a comprehensive dialogue-based guided tour programme for educational institutes and individual visitors as well as a number of talks on the subject. Children can try their hand at producing their own designs in the exhibition or can visit the design playground in the HUBERTUS WALD KINDERREICH while their parents can at last immerse themselves in the legendary „ball bath“ from IKEA Småland, which will now be reconstructed for adults in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe exhibition. At weekends (Saturdays at 2 and 4 p.m., Sundays at 1, 2, 3 and 5 p.m.) there will be discussions on the exhibition under the headline DYÄLOG with experts and aficionados.

Image: Table „Lövet“, 1956, with package, Werksentwurf IKEA, IKEA Museum, Älmhult, Schweden, Photo: Die Neue Sammlung / A. Laurenzo