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Vorwerk "dialog art collection"
Today Vorwerk is uniting more than a century of carpeting culture with the "dialog art collection". This unique avant-garde collection encompasses design drafts from the Jugendstil era, the Bauhaus age dating back to the 1920s and '30s, as well as contemporary drafts from the '80s and '90s. Working together with Vorwerk, more than forty famous artists and architects of our time have developed the "Contemporary Art: First Edition", "Classic: The Jugendstil Era", "Classic: Women at the Bauhaus" and "Contemporary Art: Flower Edition" collections. With the "dialog art collection", Vorwerk is making a contribution all its own to carpeting culture and displaying how artistic draft designs are converted into up-to-date flooring design. Hardly to be found in any other collection, a fascinating spectrum of design options is being offered for living spaces in the home as well as for prestigious objects in the contract sector. An important factor here is that these are not an elite edition for a small circle of art-lovers: the collections involved are large-scale, industrially manufactured products.
The Collections at a Glance:
Contemporary Art: First Edition (1988)
The inauguration of the "Contemporary Art: First Edition" collection in 1988 led to a decisive change in the way creative textile flooring design is viewed. Renowned artists, architects and designers such as Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Sam Francis, Norman Foster, Michael Graves, Arata Isozaki, Jean Nouvel, Gerhard Richter, Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, Sol LeWitt, Matteo Thun, Oswald Matthias Ungers and Mimmo Paladino have been active for the "First Edition". Vorwerk has literally brought contemporary art 'down to earth' with the new perspectives in 'flooring reform' initiated by this collection. Time and again, the designs' vividness and their ability to stand on their own demand an intensive, critical examination of textile flooring design as an element of the overall space.
Classic: The Jugendstil Era (1989)
Textile design drafts from the Jugendstil era were rediscovered and transposed onto carpeting for the first time by Vorwerk for the collection "Classic: The Jugendstil Era". Rather than developing copies of historical motifs, the customary practice at the time, designers such as Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Peter Behrens and Henry van de Velde created stand-alone, up-to-date, first-time drafts which found their place in the sample books of the "Wiener Werkstätten" (Viennese applied art in the Jugendstil style). The geometric or ornamental design drafts had been intended for industrial production right from the start, but back then the time had not yet come for effecting them on an industrial scale. The ongoing success of the collection is proof that many of the ideas and design drafts have remained modern and are still a guiding light today.
Classic: Women at the Bauhaus (1994)
The "Classic: Women at the Bauhaus" collection is yet another milestone of the textile avant-garde. The vision displayed by the Bauhaus has had a decisive influence on design and on those designing right up to the present day. Gertrud Arndt, Monica Bella-Broner, Kitty Fischer, Grete Reichart and Gunta Stölzl, the "Women at the Bauhaus", created a large variety of design drafts under the most difficult conditions, drafts which were first put into production by Vorwerk 75 years later as industrial production runs. As regards effecting the drafts, care was taken that only those were selected which had never been converted for series use since the time of their origin in the 1920s and 1930s.
Contemporarty Art: Flower Edition (1998)
The most recent "dialog art collection" is the "Flower Edition". With it, for the first time ever, Vorwerk made a reality of a thematically bound artists' collection developed in association with the theme "Fantasy of Flowers". How that theme was interpreted occurred with complete independence on the part of the artists. Able to be won over for the designing were the talents of the internationally acclaimed artists Klaus Fussman, April Greiman, Kazue Yoshikawa-Miyata, Jeff Koons, Marcello Morandini, Philip Taaffe, Rosemarie Trockel, Robert Wilson and Paul Wunderlich. An unusually creative and aesthetically highly imaginative carpeting collection arose from their design drafts, one whose floral motifs and forms extends from the classic-traditional to the romantically dainty and abstract-expressive, straight through to functional and geometric perspectives.
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