Museums and exhibitions have been slowly reopening all over the world after the long months of Coronavirus lockdown, but curators and event organisers have also been trying to come up with more intimate events that may be enjoyed by smaller numbers of people and maybe appreciated even more.
"Basics by Gijs Bakker and K. Schippers" (until 10th October 2021) at Sonneveld House, in Rotterdam, is one of such events and it is also an unusual exhibition of jewellery and poetry to be admired in a unique architectural context.
Renowned jewellery and industrial designer Gijs Bakker created throughout his career a variety of accessories and interior design pieces.
Dutch poet, prose writer and art critic K. Schippers (the pen name of Gerard Stigter) was inspired by the Dada movement - including artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters - and founded in the late '50s of the magazine Barbarber with J. Bernlef and G. Brands, which marked a shift from the expressive poetry of the Vijftigers to a focus on everyday reality.
While they both represent the creative arts, Bakker and Schippers also stand for different worlds - design and literature - and reuniting their creations in the same exhibition may seem rather odd.
Yet these two creative minds share something - a passion for examining what surrounds them and then reporting about it with words or through an iconic piece of jewellery. Besides, jewellery and poetry have something else in common and that's the fact that they convey a message in a compact form that can immediately reach out to people.
"Basics" features for example Bakker's "Plastic Soup" bangle (2012), inspired by the impact of plastic straws on the environment and made from straws in fluorescent colours covered with gold or silver, but also his "Black to White" necklace, a piece with the faces of Bakker's personal heroes, people of all skin colours.
This piece was created in 2016 to draw attention to persistent racism and xenophobia, but it is still relevant today (it is impossible to look at it and not think about the killing of George Floyd and the demonstrations that followed since then).
The jewellery (among the other pieces there are also Bakker's iconic abstract geometries from the '60s and his coloured stone butterfly brooch from 2008) and words on display around the house (poems are cleverly engraved on mirrors or printed on curtains) also create new connections and entertain alternative interpretations with the architecture of the house, a villa where people actually lived for many decades that was later on turned into a museum house.
Visitors can wander around the building (respecting obviously the Coronavirus restrictions), look at the jewellery, read the poems and make connections with the interior design (the majority of the furniture in the house was designed and manufactured by W.H. Gispen's company) on display and the architecture of the house, observing things from a distance and up close while thinking about the social activities that were carried out in the house in connection with spaces and objects.
Built between 1929 and 1933 Sonneveld House was designed by Brinkman & Van der Vlugt, one of the most important and most successful Dutch architecture practices in the inter-war years, the leading exponent of Functionalist architecture in the Netherlands.
Tea, coffee and tobacco manufacturer Van Nelle was Brinkman & Van der Vlugt's most important client in its early years and the directors of Van Nelle, including Albertus Sonneveld, commissioned the practice to design their own houses.
Albertus Sonneveld, his wife Gésine Sonneveld-Bos and their daughters Magdalena (also known as Puck) and Gesine (Gé) lived in Sonneveld House from 1933 to 1955.
The house adheres to the principles of Functionalism - light, air and space (it is worth remembering that this is one of the best-preserved private houses in this style in the Netherlands) - and to the five points that Le Corbusier formulated in his book Vers une architecture (1921). In this case the building's function and the needs of the residents were more important to these architects than the building's monumentality, that's why this house was designed with efficiency in mind and was made with modern techniques and materials such as steel and concrete.
These are the basic principles behind Sonneveld House that visitors will have to take into consideration in conjunction with the "basics" of design in Gijs Bakker's jewellery pieces and K. Schippers's language to find new connection points between different arts.
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