Carpenters Workshop gallery is currently exhibiting 4 exhibitions around the world.
Nacho Carbonell | Los Angeles | Inaugural Exhibition
Los Angeles I 25 June – 9 September 2022
ROM CAVEMAN TO BEACHCOMBER the archeology of the future
Since the beginning of his caveman aesthetic, where his sculptural pieces would invite people to hide from ambient fear, his interest in archeology has grown even more prominent, proposing fragmented finds and materials that coagulate into magnificent auras that take away one’s breath. As if moving from the rudimentary Stone Age to the enlightened Bronze age, Nacho Carbonell takes his progression in stride as he combs the earth for even more unique materials to be amalgamated into organic shapes. The pandemic took him deep into himself, turned him inside out and brought him to the wild shores of his Spanish childhood where he would play with his grandfather, working with familiar colliding materials such as sand and sea. He rediscovered diving and observed himself drifting in the vast ocean, scanning surfaces from above, accidental geological expressions that inspired his new quest for submerged matter from memory. He has an intuitive gift for assembling high and low materials that bond to form instinctive and primitive beau- ty. The witch-crafted designs are loaded with sand, water and wood and even stones, and speak volumes of animistic ener- gies that create palpable reverberations, such as writing with mesh, sketching with driftwood and letting things rest to rust.
Fragmenting the pieces in chapters and craters and crevasses, he might be looking for another planet to explore. Imagining further challenges for his interest in archeology, scripting stories of the beginning of other cultures, progressing his dedication to topographical material research, which has become his landscaping vision.
In these collected processes, albeit compacted, the matter becomes more transparent, the work seems to become less protective, as if the man is leaving his cave to discover the call of open plains and the palpable freedom of water, air and space. Elevating and levitating his work to new heights, the pieces seem to float, waiting to be called to heaven. Their rose-tinted meshed up materials give them the afterglow of a glorious day, the sun setting as the city of Los Angeles is com- ing to rest, illuminated by a glorious Carbonell’s chandelier.
Lidewij Edelkoort
Maestri | Milan | 2022
Milan I 7 June – 30 September 2022
Wendell Castle e Roger Herman sono Maestri dell’anima. ”Il Maestro ti apre la porta, ma tu devi entrare da solo.”
Vincenzo De Cotiis
Wendell Castle was an American artist born in Kansas in 1932. Often credited as the founding father of the American crafts movement, Castle redefined sculpture and design by seamlessly merging the two into one discipline. He created unique pieces that blur the dis- tinction between design and sculpture. Castle’s organic and whimsi- cal approach to sculpture incorporated his own invented technique of carving into stacked laminated wood known as lamination. His fur- niture represent a unique exploration of the qualities and possibilities of wood and fiberglass.
Roger Herman is an LA-based artist who was born and educated in Germany. His colourful ceramics and paintings have led to recogni- tion as the West Coast parallel of the neo-Expressionist movement of the 1980s. Raw energy and an instinctual sensory relationship to col- our and textures is immediately apparent through the bulk of his work, which spans from drawings to paintings, books to ceramics, t-shirts and woodcut prints. His wild blends of ad-hoc and quickly-dashed lines, shapes, opacities, smears layer together in awkward but sat- isfying compositions. Gestures are as boldly applied as covered up, allowing shapes to recede and reveal themselves simultaneously, in a true polyphony of style.
TIme Travel || Group Show Paris
Paris I 19 May – 3 September 2022
Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s current New York exhibition, The Female Voice in Modern Design.
An installation by DRIFT fills the Paris gallery’s project room. The Dutch studio’s delicate Fragile Future light sculptures, intricate combinations of dandelion flowers affixed to copper lattice frames, are contrasted against the weight of two chandeliers from Nacho Carbonell and Frederik Molenschot in other rooms of the gallery.
The exhibition also includes a coffee table from Vincenzo de Cotiis’ Baroquisme collection, Wendell Castle’s monumental seat Common Ground, and a Kendell Geers bronze mask from his recent exhibition, Flesh of the Spirit, at Carpenters Workshop Gallery Paris.
Next Gen | The New Guard: Paris
Paris I 19 May – 3 September 2022
Carpenters Workshop Gallery presents in our Paris gallery the sec- ond part of our “New Guard” series, an exhibition of newly commis- sioned works by six exceptional emerging artist-designers, this time all based in Europe.
This group show is intended to offer a glimpse of the new voic- es in contemporary design in Europe by presenting works by Bea Bonafini, Paul Créange, Luke Fuller, Léa Mestres, Marcin Rusak and Sylvain Rieu-Piquet.
Bea Bonafini’s magical sculptures and textiles explore the relation- ship of the work to its space and to its public. While the coloured lamps of Léa Mestres question the process of creation by emanci- pating itself from the established rules. Luke Fuller’s ceramics, with abstract and organic forms, are of a radically different aesthetic, but also question the process of creation, or rather of production, of industrial societies. Finally, the plant-driven works of Marcin Rusak and the sculptures of Paul Créange explore new sources of inspi- rations and forms of creation from elements already overexploited: nature and photography. Each of the artists presented, through a unique and personal practice, explores a new vector of creation.
