Crafted Contrasts
Design doesn’t have to feel comfortable or pleasant. It can be difficult, awkward, even eerie. There is something in all of us that is inexplicably drawn to these qualities, something that we identify with. Furniture and objects should reflect and challenge that tension, that nature. This is a guiding principle as Danish designer Maria Bruun (b.1984) contextualizes a suite of past and new works in the exhibition Crafted Contrasts. Here she rejects the assumption that a designed interior or object can only be motivated by function and logic, and refutes the notion that everything must be understood to make sense.
Her work completely eschews conventions. Part collector’s design, part commercial. There is a wild side to it. The noisy, the emotional, the intellectual, the democratic, all are aspects strongly present in her furniture and objects. Bruun’s designs want something from you. Through gestures of scale, reference, proportion, her work feels familiar but apart from that. It says something about the intention, without making the intention banal. They exist in their own right and weigh the specific as more essential than the general.
Material from Maria Bruun’s exhibition Crafted Contrasts
during the period 1 June 2024 – 18 August 2024 @ Umbrella West Coast
