On March12 Vitra Design Museum will open the first major retrospective of the work of interior architect and fabric designer Alexander Girard, featuring a vast selection of items from the Vitra Design Museum's collections, including Girard’s own private estate.
Vitra Design Museum pays homage to prominent twentieth century fabric designer and interior designer Alexander Girard (1907 – 1993). Though less well-known than some of his contemporaries, Girard had a profound impact on the aesthetics of post-war American design and was a forerunner of the globalisation of design.
The exhibition centres around more than 5000 items (drawings, photographs and sketches) from the designer's own legacy, property of the Vitra Design Museum since 1996, along with works on loan from Santa Fe Folk Art Museum and Alexander Girard's family.
Fabrics, furnishings, models, accessories, interiors, private documents and drawings that have never been exhibited in public before document Girard's vast collection of folk art and his work with Charles & Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen. Girard's work combined crafts and industry, pop culture and high society, lucid decoration and simple form, anticipating ideas and subsequent developments in the colourful vocabulary of postmodernism and today's debates on the contemporary globalisation of design. He also produced important works on a smaller scale, such as his design of the “love” motif, probably the designer's best-known symbol.
(Agnese Bifulco)
Title: Alexander Girard. A Designer’s Universe
Curators: Jochen Eisenbrand (curator), Sarah Wirth (curatorial assistant)
Date: 12 March 2016 – 29 January 2017
Location: Vitra Design Museum, Germany
Images courtesy of Vitra Design Museum
www.design-museum.de
