Black2 is the latest Konstantin Grcic curated design exhibition,
produced by Istituto Svizzero in Rome. On display from December 12 2010 to February 12 2011.
“The exhibition BLACK2 is a self-initiated project which first came to mind as I was working on the Design Real show for the Serpentine Gallery in late 2009. I got fascinated by the idea of the totally man made object. The phenomenon of the black and square form and its eternal adaptation to such manifold of different types of objects seemed astonishing and at the same time liberatingly simple. A black/square shape or form cannot be found in nature. This is what interested me: creation as a deliberate and conscious act of human intelligence.
As is known, black/square has passed through the millenary history of cultures: from the Egyptian stelae to Moses´ engraved tablets of the ten commandments; from certain Chinese ceramic traditions to the Islamic Kaaba, up to the alchemy and philosopher’s stone which, as tradition would have it, was the shape of a black cube. There is the metaphysical connotation of black/square as employed by Malevich, and later by Kubrick´s Black Monolith. The islamic Kaaba in Mecca is a black rectangle and so is the (protestant) Bible. Black/square can mean the most basic, economical, even cheap form of something. On the other hand, black/square can represent the heightening or ultimate aesthetic climax, even the mystification of an object.”
source: www.konstantin-grcic.com/
Tags: black design, black objects, black square, design exhibition rome, design rome, istituto svizzero, konstantin grcic
