New York – The New Transcendence, the last in a series of three pace-setting exhibitions curated by Glenn Adamson for Friedman Benda, will explore the place of the spiritual in contemporary design today. The works on view are infused with profound significance, whether as relics, ritual tools, or representations. The New Transcendence is not an exhibition about religion in the organized, traditional, or dogmatic sense. Rather, it aims to discover how design can serve as a vehicle for personal and societal transcendence.
The exhibition includes work by six designers: Ini Archibong, Andrea Branzi, Stephen Burks, Najla El Zein, Courtney Leonard, and Samuel Ross. Each of the participants has their own perspective, yet one thing unites them: the impetus to provide an objective, material anchor for the subjective and ultimately private nature of spiritual belief. The immaterial means something different, today, in our digital age – perhaps making physical artifacts more crucial as anchors for transcendent experience.
In tribute to Andrea Branzi’s longstanding and deep thinking on this topic, three works from his Roots series are included, which he wrote “similar to thought or philosophy. They don’t have a reason why they’re there. They are brought there by streams, the wind.” This same quality pervades the work selected for A New Transcendence; we acknowledge that they originate not only from the designer’s process, but as a result of some larger force, perhaps ancestral, perhaps cosmic.
The project marks the culmination of a trilogy that began with A New Realism (2021), which looked at pragmatism and craft-based, materially intensive process, and continued with The New Figuration (2022), an examination of the nearly unprecedented exploration of the human image in design today. As with the previous exhibitions in the series, the goal of The New Transcendence is not so much to champion individual designers as it is to establish a current archetype of practice. We are reflecting on tendencies even as we see them emerge, presenting a mosaic of possibilities which may someday (in hindsight) be more easily recognized as a distinct pattern. Having begun with raw matter, then continued with images of the body, the series now concludes with a glance towards something higher – perhaps even universal.
About Glenn Adamson
Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer, and historian based in New York and London. He has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design and Head of Research at the V&A. Dr. Adamson’s publications include Thinking Through Craft (2007); The Craft Reader (2010); Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011, with Jane Pavitt); The Invention of Craft (2013); Art in the Making (2016, with Julia Bryan-Wilson); Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018); Objects: USA (2020); and Craft: An American History (2021). His next book, A Century of Tomorrows, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2024. Dr. Adamson is Artistic Director for Design Doha, a new biennial festival for Qatar (forthcoming in 2024), and editor of Material Intelligence, a quarterly online journal published by the Chipstone Foundation. His current curatorial projects include Worlds Within: The Art of Toshiko Takaezu at the Isamu Noguchi Museum (forthcoming in 2024, and touring thereafter).
About Participating Artists
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Seminal Italian architect, designer and educator Andrea Branzi (1938-2023) has held a lifelong fascination with how humans interact with objects and has sought to reconcile design and architecture with the evolving challenges of contemporary society. Born in Florence in 1938, Branzi studied architecture at the Florence School of Architecture, receiving his degree in 1966. From 1964 to 1974, he was a founding member of the experimental group Archizoom, which envisioned the groundbreaking No Stop-City among other projects. Branzi was a key member of Studio Alchimia, founded in 1976, and went on to associate with the Memphis Group in the early 1980s. He distinguished himself as a co-founder of Domus Academy, the first international post-graduate school for design, and was a professor and chairman of the School of Interior Design at the Politecnico di Milano until 2009. Branzi is a three-time recipient of the Compasso d’Oro, honored for individual or group effort in 1979, 1987, and 1995. In 2008, Branzi was named an Honorary Royal Designer in the United Kingdom and he received an honorary degree from La Sapienza in Rome. That same year, his work was featured in an installation at the Fondation Cartier, Paris. In 2018, Branzi was the recipient of the prestigious Rolf Schock Prize in Visual Arts by the Swedish Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Branzi’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, and Victoria & Albert Museum, London among others.
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