Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec
A preview of the 2021 Design Excellence Award Honorees and Exhibition
Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec
For the fiftieth anniversary year of Collab, the 2021 Design Excellence exhibition will feature the work of brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Recognized as leading figures in a new generation of designers since the beginning of their joint practice in the late 1990s, Ronan and Erwan were born in Quimper, Brittany and completed their studies at the École supérieure des Arts décoratifs in Paris and École nationale supérieure des Arts in Cergy. From their Paris studio, their practice ranges across a variety of fields, from jewelery, ceramics and glass to furniture, lighting, spatial arrangement systems and architecture, drawings and photography. Ronan and Erwan’s works have been widely disseminated in production with manufacturers including Artek, Alessi, Axor Hansgrohe, Cappellini, Established & Sons, Flos, Hay, Kettal, Kvadrat, Kartell, Glas Italia, Ligne Roset, Magis, Iittala, Mattiazzi, Mutina, Nani Marquina, Samsung and Vitra. In addition, the designers maintain the essential development of their work through experimental activity and exhibitions with Gallery Kreo in Paris.
Aim Lamp. Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Designed 2010. Made by Flos, S.p.A., Brescia, Italy. Varnished aluminum, photo-etched polycarbonate shade.
The Bouroullec’s designs are notable for a fluid style, achieved through the application of industrial materials and processes that yet possess a sense of craft, personality and comfort through the designers’ focus on drawing as part of the design process, and frequent reference to the organic and natural materials. The brothers are particularly interested in user-oriented solutions and flexibility of use in their designs, which are often intended to be portable as a reflection of modern life and its changing domestic situations. This open-ended approach is reflected in their best-known designs, like the “Vases Combinatoires” (1998), the “Joyn” office system (2002) “Algues” [algae] (2004), and “clouds” (2009) modular partition units, the Slow chair (2007), AIM adjustable pendant lighting (2011), “Belt” lighting system (2019), “Kaari” shelving (2016), “Serif” Television (2015 & 2019), and “Ovale” collection of tableware (2010). These designs and many others reflect the brothers’ restrained and thoughtful creativity--also described as a “poetic practicality” --that has seen them win numerous prominent design awards, be subject of several monographic museum exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and feature in a comprehensive monograph published in 2012 by Phaidon, entitled “Works”.
Vegetal Chair. Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Designed 2008. Made by Vitra, GmbH, Basel, Switzerland. Polyamide plastic.
A significant aspect of Ronan and Erwan’s practice has focused on the exploration of design, architecture and environment, demonstrated in their 2016 Vitra exhibition “Reveries Urbaines” and in installations at the Château de Versailles (Gabriel Chandelier, 2013) and the Victoria & Albert Museum (textile field, 2011), and in the recent (2019) completion of the spectacular and balletic set of fountains at the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées in the heart of Paris, which consist of six 13-meter high bronze and crystal lighted structures that slowly revolve as their vertical members shed a playful cascade of water into the basins below.
The complex interplay of elements will form an important motif of the Collab exhibition in Philadelphia, which will take the form of a designer’s installation in the medieval galleries of the museum. Within the context of the twelfth-century Portal from the Abbey Church of Saint-Laurent and the thirteenth-century Cloister from Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines, the Bouroullecs will create a special juxtaposition of their designs that will provoke a memorable conversation between the setting, their visual language and the contemplative characteristics of their works.
