Bouroullecs’ exhibit at Vitra

By Pari Syal

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, better known as the Bouroullec Brothers are designers with a bent for the unusual. 

Experiential designers, they are the recipients of various awards and accolades right through from 2000 to 2011; their most recent one being the internationally renowned Compasso d’Oro for their Steelwood chair for Magis in 2011.

In addition to their diverse range of products and furniture for well-known manufacturers, namely Vitra, Kvadrat, Magis, Kartell, Issey Miyake and Cappellini among several others, the brothers have been exhibiting their work in prominent centres like the Design Museum, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Grand Hornu, Belgium and the Victoria and Albert Museum among others.

Their current exhibition being presented at the Vitra Design Museum Gallery in Germany, for the first time, features formal studies, freehand drawings and sketches that are originals. Says Mateo Kries, director of Vitra Design Museum: “On one hand, the drawings of the Bouroullecs are works of independent artistic value, whose tender, often crosshatched and at times almost naïve-seeming pictorial motifs create their own unique world of forms. On the other hand, they act as important steps within the design process to gradually move toward the ultimate proposal of a new object. The designers proceed like natural scientists who investigate and continually retest the forms of their own array of ideas with a spirit of curiosity. Inspired by this approach, the exhibition stages the objects in a manner reminiscent of a natural history museum or a laboratory.

The exhibition album shows that the work of today’s designers is a complex process in which numerous structural and technical problems must be solved. Yet even in the age of computers, drawing remains an indispensable tool for many designers, as it makes it possible to capture spontaneous, sometimes unexpected design ideas on paper and to develop an individual formal language. In so doing, the exhibition emphasises the significance drawing has always had for the conception of objects – from da Vinci to Le Corbusier. The very word “design” can be traced back to the Italian term “disegno”, which was used in the Renaissance to refer to the sketching out of a pictorial motif.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a film on the discipline of drawing - as we daily practice it. It is directed by the French collective Megaforce.

Photograph by: Ola Rindal

Venue: Vitra Design Museum Gallery, Charles-Eames-Str. 2, Weil am Rhein, Germany

Dates: 3 Fébruary - 3 June 2012

Timings:Every day from 10am to 6 pm