Tackling the limits of their discipline, through a conceptual and narrative prism. This is the mission of the artists, designers, and craftspeople featured in Objective Gallery, a gallery founded in 2020 in Shanghai by Marc Jebara and Chris Shao. This mecca for functional art has also opened a second location across the Pacific Ocean in New York, West Soho.

With these two horizons in its field of vision, the gallery offers its clients artists with singular backgrounds and profiles. Starting with Atelier V&F, founded by Chen Furong, trained at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts, and Vega Zaishi Wang, a graduate of the London College of Fashion and the venerable Central Saint Martins School. Based in Shenzen, the duo seeks to dissolve the divide between territories and cultures, to offer another face to aesthetics and functionality, putting inclusiveness at the heart of everything.

This is evidenced by their collection, “The Crack in Chaos,” inspired by Gaia, the goddess of the earth in Greek mythology, born from chaos, while being the mother of all gods and other Hellenic creatures. With a silhouette characterized by an untamable fleece, this allure is found in the multiple pieces of the collection, which expresses a raw brutality and wild power. Proof of this is “Chaos Chair,” a close seat anchored firmly and steadily into the ground, like “a steep hill or a beast.” The long pure black hair of the fleece is a metaphor for the chaos that covers everything.

Among their other notable creations, the “Merging Tables,” a set of two coffee tables, taking the shape of the unstable posture of newborn calves, depicting “a sense of disorder before power and control set in.” The two pieces, placed in a cross, present a woman-man duo or a mother-son dependency, symbolizing the continuity of life. 

Another must-see talent in the gallery is Tim Teven, a Dutch designer who graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2018. His signature? An experimental approach served by a technical talent. He treats materials in an unconventional way to rethink the manufacturing process, and thus find surprising techniques that can then be translated into a functional yet interesting object. The astonishing zinc-coated “Pressure” vases, or “Pressure Stool,” a curious aluminum seat, are examples.

New-York – United States

https://www.objectivegallery.com/

Lisa Agostini