2024-03-05 13:04:17
Designers Terezie Lexová and Štěpán Smetana, winners of the Czech Grand Design Award for 2022, conceived the new exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts in Brno as a playful story about the creation of ideas. They hung individual products, mainly furniture, in the space between the cloud-like inflatable bodies. Visitors walk through “creative heaven” on footbridges.
The installation called Out of the Blue was prepared by the Moravian Gallery in Brno, it can be seen in the museum located in Husova Street in Brno until January 26, 2025.
Curator Michaela Kádnerová talks about “free space floated by fantasy” on the one hand and grounding reality on the other in connection with hanging furniture in the air. According to her, the installation represents “a kind of topographic design scheme” made up of similar poles. “It symbolically demonstrates the exciting duality that turns the designer’s work into an exciting adventure,” says Kádnerová.
In addition to the best from Lexová and Smetana’s portfolio, such as the Seaside Sofa designed last year for the Czech manufacturer of upholstered furniture Polstrin, the project also provides an overview of how the products were created. The pair has been creating under a joint brand since 2018. It focuses on the design of products, interiors, so-called visual merchandising including the appearance of the store and the arrangement of goods on the surface, as well as small architectural solutions.
The title Out of the Blue, which can be translated as “out of the blue”, illustrates the way in which, according to Lexová and Smetana, even the best ideas sometimes come. “Maybe it’s luck, maybe fantasy combined with intuition. Maybe everything together. Sometimes you need to catch an idea so it doesn’t fly away. Develop it, free it from the cloud of indeterminacy. Determine the exact shape and connections that will give it the weight of a real product. And there are ideas that are better to let fly,” said Lexová and Smetana.
Visitors will find the exhibition in the “skylight” of the Museum of Applied Arts, which is an open vertical space across the floors crossed by footbridges. In the past, designers Lucie Koldová, Roman Vrtiška and Vladimír Žák also exhibited here.
The Czech Grand Design Awards for the year 2023 will be presented in a ceremony this Sunday, March 3, in Prague’s Estates Theater. The nominations reflect the emergence of a new generation of Czech female designers, said Jana Zielinski on behalf of the preparatory committee.