It’s been a vintage year for British design duo Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby; in the spring their first monograph was published by Rizzoli, which was followed a couple of months later by the unveiling of the 2012 Olympic torch, and now a solo exhibition at London art gallery Haunch of Venison.
Titled Ascent, the show spans three small rooms and is composed of seven pieces – that will each spawn a limited edition of six – alongside a smattering of working models and sketches. The works on display make formal allusion to Barber and Osgerby’s childhood fascination with boats and aeroplanes. A brass shelf Foil H and two functionally-dubious ‘wall-mounted structures’ share the shape of a glider’s tailplane. Of the latter, Foil V is covered in polished brass surface while Frame 1 a skeletal form rendered in wood and crafted by a boat builder. The most impressive are Planform Array V and Planform Array H, chandeliers with eight and 14 segments respectively, wrapped in Japanese paper and branching out from central stainless steel rods, appearing at once industrial and vegetal. The spare, beautiful geometries that we have come to expect from Barber and Osgerby are very much in evident, and nowhere more so that in Corona 800 and Corona 1100, doughnut shaped wall light fittings that can be seen as further iteration of the Iris series, their limited edition tables for the British manufacturer Established and Sons.
Despite being shown in an art gallery, Barber states unambiguously that their work lies in product design and not art. Unlike much of ‘Design Art’, which has tended towards narrative or exuberance and comical form-making, as displayed in the V&A’s 2009 exhibition Telling Tales, and exemplified by the work of Studio Job and Tord Boontje, Barber and Osgerby has kept to their sober aesthetics and steered clear from imbuing their works with meaning or social commentary.
As an exhibition, Ascent is not nearly as well crafted as the individual pieces. Certainly both designers and curator admit freely to not having designed these seven pieces to interact in any way with the colourful Victorian gallery spaces of Haunch of Venison’s temporary venue at 6 Burlington Gardens, while the text-free models and framed sketches fail to explicate the design process in any meaningful way.
What is most interesting about this partnership between Barber and Osgerby and Haunch of Venison – who has worked with designers before, notably Thomas Heatherwick – is the platform being carved out for design experimentation. These commissioned exhibitions allow designers to dally with complex and costly fabrication techniques (the bullnosing of Foil H demanded a technical know-how that led the designers to a small workshop in Italy) that would have been off-limits to products designed for mass manufacturing. If this is not exactly Design Art, it’s certainly a very fruitful collaboration between the two.
Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby: Ascent is on at Haunch of Venison, London from 24 Sep – 19 Nov
