George Sowden

The heart of the matter

1+1+1
a project by Elena Quarestani
curated by Marco Sammicheli
March-June 2017

George Sowden

The heart of the matter

1+1+1
a project by Elena Quarestani
curated by Marco Sammicheli
March-June 2017

1+1+1 Bijoy Jain + George Sowden + Chung Eun Mo

George Sowden, designer – one of the founders of Memphis – uses elements of his industrial productions and transforms them into a personal vocabulary to create a series of impressive installation.

The exhibition

“I am a designer and my normal day’s work is developing new product ideas and creating technical information for manufactures, as well as giving guidelines for various production processes. The artifacts, manufactured from my ideas, are for everyday use – of course they carry my signature, they represent my sensitivity, they look nice, they are new, they influence our behaviour and give identity to our environment – but they are not art, and even when I draw a pattern for a textile or a decoration for ceramic, the artwork immediately becomes a product and loses its connections with art – art is something else. And, even now when there is a lot of talk about the interference of design in the world of art, and there are a lot of examples: chairs, tables and objects reaching high prices in auctions, unique pieces, I must say that, for me, they do not substitute art. Art is more indirect. Art is more elusive and it is because art sends poetic messages without the intrusion of an implied secondary function, that for the The Heart Of The Matter exhibits I have constructed art works (and I do consider them art) using some bits-and-pieces taken from manufactured objects that I designed, including patterns I did for textiles and decorations from my ceramics. Using them as raw material I have rearranged them, sometimes changing the scale, and installing them in such a way that they are no longer recognisable as products. Decontextualised they are just colours and shapes.”

Biography

George Sowden (1942) born in United Kingdom, he moved to Milan in 1970 where he started his career as a designer and product developer; firstly in the office of Ettore Sottsass, and then as a consultant for Olivetti for whom he designed many important products including the fax machine OFX420, awarded the Compasso d’Oro in 1991. During the 1970s his design research and rediscovery of decoration, leads him to become one of the founding members of Memphis – a movement that has influenced the aesthetics and identity of global design since their first exhibition in 1981. In 1990 the Musée Des Arts Décoratifs in Bordeaux organised an anthological exhibition of his work, “George J. Sowden Designing 1970-1990”. He has designed products for many Italian companies including Alessi, Segis, Guzzini as well as Olivetti and for many other important companies around the world including, Swatch, Bodum, Steelcase, Tefal and Moulinex. Parallel to his industrial design work, he has always maintained a passionate interest in craft research, decoration, visual identity and communication. In 2010, to further his personal views, he founded his own name brand – Sowden.