Friedman Benda Presents Carmen D’Apollonio: Salut, Ça va, c’est moi

With Salut, Ça va, c’est moi the Swiss-born Los Angeles-based artist returns, delightfully enhancing her signature ludic spirit.  For these works, she engages with new materials, expanding her dimensionality and resulting in a new level of visual storytelling.

Salut, Ça va, c’est moi is the artist’s most ambitious body of work to date and with it, D’Apollonio rejects formal design formats, employing her lit creations to elicit emotion, question our humanity, and rethink how we engage with each other.

The exhibition lays out like a stage, with a cohort of personified and illuminated characters, making unique entrances and enacting clever performances across the gallery space.  These new works —all functioning lamps —cascade over pedestals, with figures that peek into walls, lie on the floor, suspend from the ceiling, grow, drip, and meander.  Again I go unnoticed cascades amorphously off the pedestal and its glass shade appears to dance in space.

The introduction of sculpted glass lampshades is a crucial turning point for D’Apollonio. Expressive, reflective, and offering an interplay of light and shadow, they create a see-saw between form and matter and open new narrative potential.   What was formerly obscured behind linen shades is now revealed – at least partially- and crafted.  It’s All a Big Mystery for example, refracts, reflects, transmits, and most of all intrigues, as it still seems hidden in plain sight.

Language has always offered an additional window into the artist’s sensibilities, inspired by direct scenarios, accessible and universal, expressing and validating vulnerability with humor and redeeming it through art. These works claim space – both visually and emotionally. Why fall in love when you can’t fall asleep, If you ever have forever, bring the viewer into direct dialogue with the artist.  They are memorable, their titles raw and confessional, eliciting empathy, reflection, and memory.

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited-edition artist book, Salut, Ça va, c’est, photographed by Stephanie Kunz, designed by Carina Frey & Stefanie Barth, and published by Quodlibet s.r.l.

About Carmen D’Apollonio
Carmen D’Apollonio investigates the entire spectrum from abstraction to figuration through her practice. Self-taught in the ceramics discipline, D’Apollonio’s approach to her acclaimed sculptural lighting and vessels celebrates the fusion of craftsmanship with functionality. “My work is simple; it often gives way to humor. As if clay had its way of being, its own personality,” she explains.

Born in Switzerland in 1973, D’Apollonio previously worked as an art director for short films and commercials in the mid-nineties. In 2006, she founded the fashion brand Ikou Tschuss (ikou means “let’s go” in Japanese and tschüss is “bye-bye” in Swiss German), which combined modern textiles with traditional artistry. D’Apollonio established her own studio in Los Angeles in 2014. D’Apollonio’s process begins with sketching, which she then translates into clay—evolving the three-dimensional form as she goes. Her titles range from the comic to the plaintive and offer narrative fragments entirely in tune with their suggestive, open-ended compositions. D’Apollonio lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Friedman Benda identifies and advances key narratives that intersect contemporary design, craft, architecture, fine art, and cutting-edge technological research. The gallery promotes synthesis between leading creative thinkers and makers by creating opportunities to advance new connections within the global design community. Friedman Benda is committed to a critical view of design history. We aim to expand the design dialogue from its established sources, exploring perspectives that have previously been marginalized. Spanning five continents and four generations, Friedman Benda represents a roster of seminal established and emerging designers, as well as historically significant estates. With locations in New York and Los Angeles, the gallery’s exhibitions, publications and collaborations with institutions have played a vital role in the development of the contemporary design market and scholarship since 2007. For further information please visit www.friedmanbenda.com and the gallery’s Instagram @friedman_benda and YouTube channel.