June 1 - July 1, 2008
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ARNE QUINZE
Belgium
Ever since the Belgian artist Arne Quinze joined the debate on design and launched his notorious Primary Pouf in 1999, a seating object that could also be seen as a raised middle finger to the design world, be it only because of its delirious colors, he's never been out of the news. Made from a cold foam this cube on legs also heralded the birth of the furniture design company Quinze&Milan, of which he is still the creative director. Today furniture by Quinze&Milan can be found in the interiors of some of the most emblematic buildings of the past decade, such as Rem Koolhaas' Public Library in Seattle, while Quinze also designs for other leading brands such as Swarovski, Dark and Moroso.
From the outset, Quinze&Milan used the slogan Creators of Atmosphere: a piece of furniture was not an aim in itself but stood for a lifestyle that challenged the reigning minimalism: wild and sexy, carefree and fun, loud and outrageous. The press soon welcomed Quinze as the pop star of furniture, the bad boy of the design world and a bit of punk but also a bit of Prada, while he also describes himself as the leader of a hardcore rock band.
His headquarters in Kortrijk, Belgium, are located in a historically important industrial complex of 10 000 square meters. This unique creative platform employs more than 60 people and comprises a gallery cum showroom, together with the offices and production units of Quinze&Milan, and Studio Arne Quinze, where Quinze has surrounded himself with architects, urban developers, product and graphic designers, and artists. The Studio moves across a large range of fields - from architecture interiors to branding.
But despite his world fame as a designer, Arne Quinze still considers himself as first and foremost an artist. As a homeless teenager he found his vocation in graffiti, and when he later decided to step out of anonymity, design became only one field that allowed him to go for a much larger impact. Meanwhile, the unique status of the Studio Arne Quinze also offered him the possibility to move in other directions, with a series of sculptures and installations that are as carefully chosen as they are powerful, dragging the spectators along in a total experience. In 2006, Quinze won instant fame with Uchronia, a gigantic sculpture exclusively built with wooden slats and nails in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, as part of the Burning Man Festival, and destroyed by fire at the end of the event. The sculpture, the largest of its kind that he'd built until then, was meant to represent a hole in time, and a gateway to the future: a society that is not reigned by the pursuit of gain, and that gives priority to creativity, tolerance, innovation and flexibility - structuring itself like an organic network and harmonic chaos.
One year later, Quinze built Cityscape, an equally impressive sculpture, a frozen movement that had to revive a somewhat neglected neighbourhood in the Belgian capital: a forest of thirty 12-metre high stilts supporting 60 kilometers of wooden slats, held together in a frantic, criss-crossing rhythm by 240 000 nails - carefully calculated and flawlessly improvised. That very same year his Dreamsaver stood central to the Crystal Palace exhibition in Milan, while he built his first one-man-show, Mutagenesis, as the guest of honour at the prestigious Italian design event Abitare II Tempo in Verona, focusing on the myriads of mutagens that will define the DNA of the future. Covering a surface of more than 4000 m2, the show also revealed Quinze's passion for travelling, speed and cars. Next to the Experience Truck, hailed as a mobile version of Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut because of the miraculous mosaic of light that shines thro ugh numerous colourful stained-glass windows on an interior of seamless and immaculate white leather, Quinze also exhibited a number of large, organic sculptures, such as Magna and Skytracer-abstract forms that showed some resemblance to pre-historic beings, and were at the same time meant to be prototypes of transporters in a distant future.
A nomad in body and soul, Quinze constantly travels the world, catching vibes, like a seismograph, rendering visibility to the unbridled energy that forms the essence of everything. It translates itself in the way he succeeds in speeding up or freezing time, in his preference for asymmetrical forms, and a constant clash of opposites, such as high-tech versus primitive, Futurism versus Atavism, organic versus de-constructivist, or rational versus irrational. The result is chaotic, creative, dynamic and dialectic, wild and impossible to grasp, but at moments also harmonious and of an indescribable beauty, like a flock of starlings or a cloud, constantly gliding into new patterns. The liquid logic that is at the base of all this, permanently on the move, and with a centre that is nowhere and everywhere, a vision that is also gaining ground in physics at rapid speed, remains an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Quinze.
