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16th Aug 2019
Luxury, at the start of the 21st century and in the close of its second decade, is suffering an identity crisis — a crippling confusion of self and service in a marketplace made wildly unpredictable by the intangibles of technology, ethics and experience. But no such uncertainty clouds creation or projected character at Spanish fashion house Loewe, founded in 1846 as a cooperative of precision leather makers in Madrid, which has doggedly defined itself across the decades as an artisan.
Its commitment to craft — the highly skilled type that pushes tradition into new conceptual territory — exhibits in the annual Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, an award conceived by Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson in 2016 to celebrate the cultural contribution of artisans around the world.
“I wanted to create a platform to highlight what has been done by hand by potters, basketweavers, furniture designers, jewellers and other professionals who work quietly and are often underestimated,” says Anderson of the prize’s inauguration.
The prize, growing with a gravitas, respect and reward — €50,000 — typically reserved for the contemporary art world, was this year announced in Tokyo. Here, the 29 short-listed works (culled from more than 2500 submissions and representing more than 100 countries) exhibited within the sublime proscenium of Isamu Noguchi’s stone garden, Heaven, at the base of Kenzo Tange’s Sogetsu Kaikan curtain-wall complex.
This marriage of minimalist architecture and art, respectively conceived in the 1970s, reminds us how transgressive and transcendent ‘quiet’ creativity can be when a wilful modernity applies to old ways. It is the Loewe ethos enshrined in location.
The relevance of exhibition context was not lost on the short-listed few who, though wildly different in their formal expressions, techniques and regional mindsets, had all pushed their media to the limits of materiality with a mastery of traditional skills. If you could mine any comment on the current state of craft from their collective display, it’s that hand-making has become more conceptual, more sculptural, more attuned to the psychosocial concerns of the times and more removed from the base remit of utility. Or was it just indicative of Loewe’s aesthetic leanings? Either way, it toppled the old hierarchy of art over craft and tested the prize jury, comprising design luminaries Naoto Fukusawa, Patricia Urquiola, Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu and the director of London Design Museum, Deyan Sudjic, to pick one above all others. But as the artists gathered, pre-announcement, to explain their respective work and speculate on the top prize, they all self-declared as winners for simply being nominated.
“It’s a bit like the Olympics,” says North Wales-based Japanese artist Junko Mori, whose pretty forged-steel Nigella Chrysanthemum belied a prickly punk conceptualism. “To be here is to win.”
UK artists Jim Partridge and Liz Walmsley seconded that emotion, chiming in that the pair rarely venture outside Shropshire but felt like they’d won the lottery on learning that they and their minimalist charred-oak seat would travel to Tokyo. They hazarded a guess at the commonality of all exhibited offerings, Walmsley deciding that they testified to “a certain quiet and a deeply personal extreme of making”.
That extreme pushed Japanese artist Sachi Fujikake’s glassblowing to the brink of figurative and technical collapse — her glass box, Vestige, crumpling like cardboard — and challenged UK artist Annie Turner to make clay look like woven latticework in NET.
The collective investigation of material limits led subject matter into the dark — both inner psyche and outer space. Dutch designer Ruudt Peters ruminated on the gravitational field of black holes in mini archetypes of baby’s bathtubs made from precious metal and stones. Korean artist Minhee Kim wove subtext on her country’s comfort women into the fine filament work, Funeral Clothes for Women.
The ubiquity of baleful concern vibrated strongest in Blue Velvet, a vessel by Israeli ceramicist Michal Fargo, who seemingly flocked an alien geology in a blue fungal growth. She credited her presence in Tokyo to a 2012 win in the International Category of the Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Prize. “I wouldn’t be here without that win,” she says of the prize that gives in perpetuity. “Can you thank the Myer family for me?”
Hers was not the only nod to the Antipodes. German ceramicist Elke Sada conceded that her expressionist colouring of the “deliberately pieced-together vessel” Eolophus (Hallstattpiece) came from Queenie — the pink-and-grey galah cockatoo captured in photographic portrait by Aussie artist Leila Jeffreys in 2012. Sada’s ceramic evidenced further group interest in a right-now regionalism (be it far-flung or close) and the contrast of antiquity.
Of this pervasive embed of contradictions in the short-listed craft, prize juror Sudjic rhetorically asked, “Was it not Karl Marx who used the word dialectic?”
He ventured his personal rationale behind the final jury pick of Japanese artist Genta Ishizuka as the 2019 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize winner. “It pays a certain respect to a thousand-year tradition of lacquer-making,” he says of the artist’s Surface Tactility #11 — an urushi (painting with lacquer on 3D objects) smothering of styrene foam balls that suggests a bag of oranges and a menacing something other. “But it liberates itself from the constraints of that tradition because it’s a piece that could not have been made by a lacquer artist at any other time.”
Genta Ishizuka is the 2019 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize winner
Loewe’s creative director Anderson described it as “a meteorite fallen from space”, but design scribe and jury chair Anatxu Zabalbeascoa zeroed in on its currency, in comment on all short-listed craft, as defining “the most complete human being” and representing “a time when developing skills makes you a free person”.
See every finalist from the 2019 award here.
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