FIRST RUSSIAN DESIGN SHOW STARTS IN JUNE, 2008
Curator - Janna Bullok, RIGroup founder & CEO

Janna Bullock, Founder and CEO of RIGroup, has announced plans for RIGroup Design Show in Ecoestate Pavlovskaya Sloboda, Moscow Region, on 1st of June – 1st of July, 2008. The show will attract more than 24 world-famous designers for 4 weeks and will be a site for numerous professional designer and developer workshops, art performances, cocktail receptions and exhibitions. RIGroup Design Show will gather a great  number of unique  interior pieces, many of which would be shown in Russia for the first time.

RIGroup is acclaimed around the world for its commitment to the very best in art, architecture and design. The New York Times wrote that the RIGroup and its CEO Janna Bullock had “perfected the art of how to host decorator show houses”. Showhouse would be run with the participation of Moscow Multimedia Art Canter of Contemporary Art and St Petersburg Hermitage.

RIGroup Design Show aims to demonstrate the basic tendencies of contemporary interior design and to acquaint the audience with leading decorators and their artwork. Many of numerous European and American interior design masterpieces will be represented in Russia for the first time.

RIGroup will unveil its fifth Design Show house in a new, private, gated community on June 1st. There will be three designer houses and three theme houses. The designers selected include Nina Campbell, Alain Moatti with Henri Riviere and the auction house Phillips de Pury & Company. The theme houses will be the EcoHouse, the Russian House and the Designers’ House.

The EcoHouse will be designed by Giancarlo Alhadeff and will contain the newest trends and technologies in eco-design. It will harmonize with the natural wood houses from the Finnish builder Vuokatti. The work of Mr.Alhadeff is fully supported by RIGroup, a committed global leader in Green Development. EcoHouse will include pieces of  Ettore Sottass, Maria Pergay, Mattia Bonetti, Jon Male, Piero Fornasetti, Marcel Wanders, Herve Van der Straten, Phillippe Starck etc.

The Designer’s House will feature rooms with pieces by such masters as Frank Gehry, David Adjaye, Herve Van der Straten etc. One room will be decorates with Contrasts Gallery collection – artworks from cutting-edge artists and commissioned pieces from designers worldwide. In addition, the show will for the first time bring to Russia the 50’s classic – Gio Ponti’s collection from Vembi-Burroughs, Genoa and The Campana Brothers collection recently exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Along with the Gio Ponti room, interested buyers will have the opportunity to see renderings of these sophisticated interiors before the show houses are opened to the public and will have an opportunity to purchase the interiors and art works. The majority of pieces are taken from Albion Gallery.

Also as a special project there will be presented a Russian House as it was seen by Janna Bullock, RIGroup President and Russian Design Show Curator. The show house will be a harmony between natural materials of wood and stone with modern Russian art and design and exquisite examples of 19th  century Russian furniture loaned by the Hermitage museum. It will also include some pieces from Arman collection. Janna Bullock is going to fulfill her own idea of Russian House and her project will be Dacha like no other.

Russian Design Show will showcase various outdoor installations, such as exhibition of permanent participants of the Arhstoyanie Festival – Russian artist Nikolay Polissky and his co-authors, habitants of the village Nikola-Lenivets; SUPER VESCH exhibition by Mikhail Labazov and his Studio DEZ №5; Mobile House installation created by MARHI students and directed by architects Vlad Savinkin and Vladimir Kuzmin. The program will also include a special exhibition dedicated to the world-known artworks of Frank Gary, a Pritzker Prize winning world-famous architect. This event will be supervised by Vlad Savinkin.

For the one month of Russian Design Show Ecoestate Pavlovskaya Sloboda will turn into of the interior design capital, full of bright, relevant and unique interior artworks from all over the world.

HISTORY

This will be the fifth Design Show that RIGroup has hosted on two continents. In 2005 The Kips Bay Decorator Show House, America’s premier designer show, which featured the work of 19 designers including Ann Getty, the wife of Gordon Getty, opened to rave reviews in the turn of the century Jenks Mansion at 54 East 64th  Street in New York City. In 2006 the International Designer Show House, which benefited the American Hospital in Paris, was held at the Stillman Mansion at 9 East 67th Street, showcasing the work of 24 designers including Albert Hadley, the dean of American interior designers.

In the spring of 2007, Kips Bay once again choose another impeccably restored RIGroup property at 14 East 82nd  Street with a view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be its show house. This magnificent Beaux Arts building previewed the work of 19 designers including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s personal decorator, Jamie Drake, as well as Jed Johnson Associates, who designed the last residence of pop art icon Andy Warhol.

In June of 2007, RIGroup opened Midsummer Dream, an Art House by the late avant-garde architect Norman Jaffe in Southampton, New York. The house, at 210 Meadow Lane, featured an extensive Africana exhibition by photographer Peter Beard and works by Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Anselm Kiefer, Vanessa Beecroft, Yoshitomo Nara, Tom Wesselmann, David Salle, Tony Oursler, Arman, and Yves Klein, as well as outstanding design pieces by George Nakashima, Craig Lauterbach, G. Coffey, Jean Prouve, Georges Jouve, and George Nelson.  Later that month, the RIGroup was the lead sponsor of the Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys exhibit at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection at the Venice Biennale and Dennis Hopper in the Hermitage museum.

The company's cross-cultural exchange between Europe and the USA continued in December when it brought Russia Miami, an exhibition event featuring the work of 20 contemporary Russian artists to Art Basel Miami Beach 2007, a sequel to its Modus R Show which opened to rave reviews during the same art fair in 2006.