Collecting Design: The Legends – With Fredrikson/Stallardand & David Gill

                                                                                                                                         Yana Peel, Global 
                                                                                                               Head of Arts & Culture at Chanel

“I was first introduced to the work of Fredrikson Stallard on a trip to London, where I visited the David Gill Gallery. So breathtakingly original, I loved the interesting materials and sculptural qualities in each object. The fact that their furniture is also functional has been a huge plus for my projects… It wasn’t until much later after several special commissions that I had the chance to visit their atelier and home—it all made sense, the organized artistic chaos and vision that I encountered there. I loved their work even more!”

Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard, co-founders of the London-based collaborative art and design studio Fredrikson Stallard (FS), stand at the forefront of the British avant-garde. In this week’s talk, they were joined by their dealer and mentor, legendary design gallerist and global tastemaker David Gill. 

Since discovering FS, as they came to be known in 2006, Gill exclusively represents and shows their work at his London gallery, a magical temple of design and hub of cutting-edge objects of the highest level of ambition, imagination, and novelty. Gill explained in the talk how FS’s pieces exemplify the zeitgeist. The exceptional use of materials and original forms, he maintained—the soul that these objects introduce into interior spaces—are key aspects in understanding them intellectually, aesthetically, and emotionally as well as recognizing their value within the larger landscape of contemporary design.

We opened the talk by looking at Avalanche, a mirror made of small pieces of broken mirror shards set in an exquisite bronze and glass box. Precision and craftsmanship, we learned, constitute the foundation of FS’s work, and this fairy-tale-like object embodies the energy, chaos, and the innovative approach to materials, light, and form for which the duo is known. The piece’s unique authenticity allows the users who interact with it to experience their living spaces in new ways and to think differently about design as an agent of transformation.

Design to FS is first of all a kind of performance that combines art, design, motion, and sensuality, while at the same time expressing a superb sense of style. Just like Avalanche, all of FS’s furniture designs are unexpected and fresh as fresh can be. In their hands, the most basic materials—crumpled metal, broken glass, carved foam, cut cardboard, and raw birch logs—are transformed into chic and dreamy objects of desire.

Malmö-born Fredrikson and Essex-born Stallard met while attending Central Saint Martins, the famed London design and art school. They founded their atelier in 1995 and nine years later were discovered by Gill. They have since established their studio and home in a former printing shop in East London—a move that is a familiar phenomenon of the contemporary British design scene, which emerged at the advent of the provocative punk movement in the late ‘70s and has since perpetuated the protest styles of impresarios like Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. FS’s work is charged with this East London, punk-era spirit of originality, seduction, and rebellion, yet tempered by exceptional sophistication and refinement. By closely examining the contradictions inherent in FS’s work, as Gill showed us, we are left with a more elevated taste and more elastic mind.