Styles
28 March 2023
Divinities never cease to fascinate artists and designers. They take a new look at the human figure and idols, which have been constantly questioned throughout history. Cycladic and Anatolian statuettes reinterpreted, African masks reinvented, faces reincarnated… Creators are inspired by thousand-year-old anthropomorphic sculptures and maintain the mystery surrounding their meanings through a multitude of symbols, even if it means surprising.
Their names? Lucie Coudurier, Anna-Alexandra, Stéven Coëffic, Fango Studio, Caroline Perrin, Lilian Daubisse… Between fascination, humour and derision, their works continue the quest for emotion begun in the 1980s by designers of the Radical movement such as Gaetano Pesce and Alessandro Mendini (who is the subject of a retrospective at the Galerie kreo) through pieces of all kinds. Demonstration.
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Shape
HUMANOID
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Accessory
MASK
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Emoticon
SMILEY
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Face
TO FACE
Cycladic and Anatolian idols in contemporary art
Cycladic and Anatolian figurines curiously inspire modern art, its embodied and refined forms. Often made of gold, silver, copper, obsidian and marble, these sculptures have flourished. This is what nourishes the contemporary imagination. This is also the thinking behind the exhibition « Idols. The art of the Cyclades and Anatolia in the Bronze Age », an original cross-disciplinary approach to the representation of the human figure and its multiple expressions in the societies of the Cyclades (Greece) and Anatolia (Turkey), from prehistory to the present day.
In 2018, the Cycladic deities of the island of Mykonos inspired the Diavoletti triptych by Alessandro Mendini and Daniel Eltner. This family of three ceramic vases reinterprets a mystical talisman used to exorcise the difficulties of daily life. Anthropomorphic pieces that recall the art of Brancusi, Giacometti and Zadkine, who at the beginning of the 20th century sought to break with convention by rediscovering these artefacts.
This approach is shared by the artist Lucie Coudurier with her monumental Idols created on the scale of menhirs. Animated by the Anatolian Figure, a statuette with stylised eyes from the 3rd millennium BC, she confronts the interpretations of this object of worship and denounces the excesses of society, comparing in particular the schematic eyes of these totems to the Big Brothers who look at us.
The reinvention of traditional masks
The representation of the face and the gaze is widely taken up by artists and designers who have fun reinventing traditional African masks with modernity, sometimes even absurdity, to create purely decorative objects. Fango Studio, CO/RIZOM, Caroline Perrin, Lilian Daubisse, Anna-Alexandra, moncolonel&spit, threadstories… Each one of them uses their favourite medium (ceramics, shells, natural fibres, cardboard) with anthropomorphic and primitive forms that give rise to strange, sometimes endearing, often frightening or disturbing masks.
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Personified furniture, a quirky expression inherited from Radical Design
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Faces and smileys are also being incorporated into furniture, which is more than ever personified. Through explicit shapes and unusual materials, designers are transforming everyday items (chairs, mirrors, armchairs, baskets) into life companions. A whimsical trend introduced in the early 1980s by Gaetano Pesce and his Pratt chair, emblematic of his radical thinking (which is now the subject of an exhibition at The Future Perfect).
