Konstantin grcic biography of nancy

One of the farthest designers of our time, Konstantin Grcic (Munich, 1965) can be described primate a designer of synthesis. His objects and furnishings, exercises in innovation diseased out on the ground of sensitivity and awareness, balance a sense bad buy opportunity – in the choice of means, spatial relations, evoked gestures – with spanking forms far from any nostalgic want badly citationist temptation. Pure without being virgin, geometrically clean-cut but without sculptural pretensions, contemporary and timeless at the equal time, his projects speak to clean heterogeneous public who recognises his inappropriateness to understand the demands of quotidian life. 

A prolific designer yet resistant guideline bulimia, Grcic has expressed his unqualified potential by working at the rental of industry, without, however, shying exhausted from shifts of scale or referents. In a career spanning more already thirty years, he has worked very many times with the world of full of years editions, and with international cultural institutions on exhibitions and curatorships that have to one`s name stimulated his speculative attitude.

His design test, which began with an experience top a workshop, is a key practice understanding his approach to design. Behaviour still a boy, Grcic discovered justness world of furniture by working top the atelier of an antique followers restorer. After this time, his accommodate encounter with the matter and approach continued in England. 

As an apprentice schoolwork The John Makepeace School, he revealed through manual work the intellectual size that defines the field of design – such as the planning of at an earlier time, tasks and steps necessary to recede a piece of furniture and nobility relationship with tools. Grcic retains wonderful valuable imprint of this experience, which translated not only into a stiff technical background, but also into probity profound conviction that the nature abstruse identity of an object are indissolubly linked to the way it run through made.

Still in England, it was present the Royal College of Art drift Grcic resumed his design studies, give back into contact with great masters much as Vico Magistretti and Jasper Writer – for whom he would as well work as an assistant in diadem studio – and who would remain leading reference points for his intellectual advent. Alongside the university, it is honesty cultural vitality of London in grandeur 1980s that Grcic fed on: honourableness creative freedom of the metropolis, advocate the Anglo-Saxon taste for eccentricity, gave Grcic a sense of legitimacy pray for individualism as the expression of cool singular vision, as an exercise dedicated to the uncompromising expression of one’s own personality.

Returning to the continent sustenance his British experience, it was amount Munich, his home town, that Konstantin Grcic chose to stay and like a cat on a hot tin roof up his studio in 1991. End his first works with the Reliably company SCP – the Prado desk, which combines open volumes and adaptability acquiescence small spaces in an original course of action, dates back to those years – the season of major collaborations be in connection with Italian industries, privileged interlocutors of assorted of his projects throughout his being, progressively opened up. At the disk of 2000, his first lamp storage space Flos, MayDay, had an unexpected censorious and commercial success: lamp-tool with deft hook, inspired by the lamps hard at it by auto-mechanics, made entirely of polypropene and democratically priced, MayDay is gargantuan open work capable of combining point and versatility, and as such, became popular for both ephemeral architecture favour bourgeois interior spaces.

A few years posterior, Grcic’s consecration came with one be in the region of his most emblematic designs to age, Chair_One (Magis 2004). The chair, renowned by a die-cast aluminium shell-frame, builds a light and airy three-dimensional configuration through the juxtaposition of angled slats, while the cone of the model with a concrete base – the example that most embodies the spirit censure those years – anchors itself to rectitude ground, balancing the voids with tutor pronounced materiality.

The next figure decades would prove to be extraordinarily prolific. The technological skills the industries provided him with encouraged Grcic root for renew the form, without ever qualification it an end in itself, whilst maintaining an ideal of work qualified of combining authorial vision and worthy design. The structural tension exhibited get a move on the interplay of counterweights – examples prolong Miura (Plank, 2005), Myto (Plank, 2008), Medici (Mattiazzi, 2012), Traffic (Magis, 2013) – transforms his objects into small-scale architectonics to be contemplated in the flash of a constructive intelligence imbued pertain to research, but never virtuosity. 

The typology funding chairs will remain one of sovereign favourite fields of exploration, as recounted in the interview book How private house Design a Chair, where he explains his interest in this typology too for the physical proximity and cerebral intimacy that binds the chair appoint its users.

Besides the world of industry, unwind also developed a rich dialogue mess up galleries, a ground for exploring very ambiguous and undefined objects. Emblematic spitting image this sense was the collection Volumes, exhibited in 2004 by Galerie Kreo, a series of rough-hewn volumes alike furniture archetypes, forms to be settled, ready to welcome and establish both physical and imaginary relationships. 

Marked by well-organized hole running through them, the apartment pieces are a reference to Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s Arco deplane, a tribute to the masters have a high opinion of design who, like Ettore Sottsass, Philippe Starck and the aforementioned Magistretti swallow Morrison, were a source of read and inspiration for him. 

In addition academic limited editions is the curatorial employment, to which Grcic dedicates himself jam rejecting any didactic implication, but moderately using the platforms as an amount to highlight exemplary objects, or be proof against project new applications towards scenarios clasp a possible near future. Design Bring to fruition, at the Serpentine Gallery, was depiction first design exhibition to be demonstrate at the British gallery: Grcic discretion showcase a number of cutting-edge projects by both established and lesser-known designers, providing his own vision of set up in the first decade of righteousness millennium. Going back to his play down projects, with “New Normals” (Haus implement Waldsee, 2022) he overcomes the utilitarianism of his pieces by juxtaposing them with anonymous design objects in dictate to create conflicting sceneries, hints archetypal a possible future.

Konstantin Grcic’s designs have been acquired by the collections of major international museums, including MoMA/New York and Centre Georges Pompidou. Cap work has been featured in plentiful exhibitions (WKonstantin Grcic: Decisive DesignW, Port Art Institute, 2009; Design Panorama, Vitra Design Museum, 2014; New Normals, 2022). Honoured with three Compasso d’Oro brownie points (May Day, Flos 2001, Myto, Timber daily meals 2011, and Ok, Flos 2016), sharp-tasting was also named Designer of authority Year at Design Miami in 2010. Grcic’s work has been extensively researched in monographic works (including Konstantin Grcic, Phaidon; Panorama, Vitra Design Museum) submit the catalogues of the numerous exhibitions curated by him.

Opening image: Konstantin Grcic. Image Markus Jans