Functional Art Gallery is pleased to present OrtaMiklos, Franco-Danish duo, for the gallery’s first participation in Design Miami/ Basel. For the occasion, OrtaMiklos created “Decadence”, a flamboyant series of mutant furniture-objects inspired by the painting “The Romans in their Decadence” by Thomas Couture.
The ten new sculptures are installed to form a Tablinum. Four pairs are created, mirroring each other, reflecting on OrtaMiklos’ duality. Similar in forms, the works diverge from one another, being of different colors and coatings that express the exuberant creativity of the two designers. In this presentation, the duo’s post-modernist influence has been twisted, giving birth to new shapes, simultaneously surrealist and baroque.
These mirroring works bring the focus on two unique objects, forming the centerpiece, where the artists propose a meeting around a daybed and coffee table, which could be a scene taken from a Roald Dahl or Lewis Carroll novel.
OrtaMiklos refer to their practice as Irrational Design and are exploring design abstraction. They begin working from a material naivety, pushing this to explore the boundaries of physical works. They deliberately force their ideas into unknown aesthetic territories irrespective of on-going trends, color, themes or material value, which gives them the freedom to step-out of preconceived styles or frameworks. Their work navigates between art and design, as they have a foot in both fields, pushing boundaries, whether they are physical or conceptual.
OrtaMiklos (Leo Orta, France 1993 / Victor Miklos, Denmark 1992) was founded in 2015 at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Recent group exhibitions include Dutch Design Week Eindhoven and the Salone del Mobile Milan. They had a solo exhibition at the Museo Marino Marini, Florence. This fall, their work will be included in a group exhibition at the K11 Art Foundation in Guangzhou, China and “Foncteur d’Oubli”, curated by Benoit Maire at Le Plateau, FRAC Ile de France in Paris.
OrtaMiklos live and work between Eindhoven, The Netherlands and Studio Orta Les Moulins, France.
