MSCHF: INDUSTRY PLANTS

Art collective MSCHF returns to Perrotin New York with Industry Plants.

September 6 – October 19, 2024

Sprouting from the landscape of MSCHF’s third exhibition at Perrotin are two new large-scale works created in collaboration with the renowned Italian furniture company Gufram. Since 1966, Gufram has been responsible for producing some of the most provocative and iconic creations associated with the Radical Design movement. Art historian and curator Germano Celant introduced the term “radical” to describe the various architects and designers operating in Italy who sought to critique bourgeois consumerism and the self-righteous functionalism of modernist design through their embrace of eye-catching, unconventional forms and new manufacturing techniques and materials.

Responding to both the particularities of the Italian postwar economy and the larger waves of sociocultural unrest sweeping the globe in the 1960s, these designers viewed design as a tool to bring about revolutionary shifts in how people conceived of and engaged with the world around them. Their visually striking designs quickly gained international recognition through the circulation of images in design magazines and as the subject of the groundbreaking exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, held in New York at MoMA in 1972.

By situating the source of these contemporary technological anxieties onto an artificial representation of the natural world destined for the domestic interior, MSCHF adds a fresh layer of discourse to the prickly relationships between culture and nature, interior and exterior, desire and ambivalence.

In Industry Plants, MSCHF also presents a selection of artworks shown for the first time in New York, which challenge our understanding of what constitutes a "masterpiece."