I + I + I
Johanna Grawunder + Christoph Hefti + Antoni Malinowski

Opening Sunday 8 April 2018, at 6 pm
with a performance by Elio Marchesini

Johanna Grawunder

Designer/artist Johanna Grawunder works on a broad range of projects, from large-scale public lighting and color installations, architectural interventions and interiors, to limited-edition furniture and light collections for Carpenters Workshop Gallery in US and Europe. She has collaborated with many notable architects and designers, creating custom lighting installations in their projects, and has also designed products for top companies including Flos, Boffi, and GlasItalia.
With an architectural background, she was drawn to the medium of light early on and has tried to incorporate architectural principles and scale, non-precious building materials and high technology light research into her designs. Current commissions include a public art commission for San Francisco Airport (completion 2019),  a new Light Art collection for Carpenters Workshop Gallery as well as the exhibition “Alone Together” for Assab One in Milan. Her work is included in many museum permanent collections, including the High Museum Atlanta, LACMA, CNAP, SFMOMA, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Art Institute Chicago, Denver Art Museum and Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris.With a degree in Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, she studied and worked with Gianni Pettena and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia of Superstudio in Florence (1984-1985) then moved to Milan to work with Sottsass Associati (1985-2001), becoming a partner in 1989. At Sottsass Associati she was involved primarily with architecture and interiors, co-designing with Ettore Sottsass, many of the firm’s most prestigious projects.  In 2001 she opened her own design studio in San Francisco and Milan. http://grawunder.com

Christoph Hefti

Textile designer and artist Christoph Hefti, born in Switzerland, divides his time between Zurich, Paris, Stockholm and Brussels. After studying textile design in Zurich and fashion at Central Saint Martins in London, he started designing for Jean-Paul Gaultier in Paris and Dries Van Noten in Antwerp, where he spent 13 years as a creative assistant and was responsible for the printed fabrics, including research, design and development. On a freelance basis, Hefti designed for Lanvin and Balenciaga in Paris, and currently works on printed fabric projects for Acne Studios in Stockholm. Parallel to his career in fashion, Christoph Hefti creates video installations that are shown in art spaces all over Europe. In collaboration with other artists, he is also active in the field of the performing arts, where he combines music, costume design, video and live art. Hefti interweaves all these media seemingly effortlessly in a whole, consistent, creative universe.
Christoph Hefti is highly esteemed as a member of juries for competitions in Switzerland and abroad. He himself has been awarded several Swiss Design Awards. In 2009 he won the ‘Grand Prix Design’ for his multidisciplinary oeuvre.
Christoph Hefti’s love for crafted textiles has taken him to Nepal, where he designs and develops his own series of hand-knotted rugs. During his visits to Nepal, Christoph rediscovered the direct interaction between the designer and the craftsman and became fascinated by the use of traditional crafts in a contemporary context. He approaches the mystical and even spiritual tradition of storytelling textiles through his very personal yet worldly themes. The work of Christoph Hefti is part of the collection of the Swiss National Museum and private collections in Swit-zerland, the Netherlands and the US.

Antoni Malinowski

Antoni Malinowski is an artist who works with pigment, light, movement and time, investigating the dynamic relationship that exists between pictorial and architectural spaces. After studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and furthering his studies at the Chelsea Collage of Art, Malinowski has established and based his practice in London. Since his first wall drawing installations in the mid 1980s Antoni Malinowski has been working in a variety of media including painting on canvas and walls, video, and drawing on often very large scale. Malinowki’s paintings have been exhibited internationally and are in many private and public collections including Tate, London. Following his major solo exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre, London in 1997 Antoni Malinowski spent several months as an Abbey Scholar at the British Shool at Rome researching the ancient Roman wall paintings. This triggered many collaborations with architects on permanent interventions in architecture. They range from engineering colour for facades to complex wall paintings and include Vermilion Wall painting spanning three floors at the Royal Court Theatre(2000), London and the façade and interior spaces of the Coin Street Community Centre(2007), London , both collaborations with Haworth Tompkins Architects; wall painting at the Luxor Theatre (2002), Rotterdam , collaboration with Bolles+Wilson Architects; Venetian glass mosaic( 2010)for the elevation on Maddox Street, London , collaboration with Eric Parry Architects. In 2013 Malinowski has completed wall and ceilings paintings at the HTA refurbished Chichester Festival Theatre and also the foyer ceiling paintings at the new Everyman Theatre, Liverpool designed by Haworth Tompkins – this won the 2014 Stirling Prize. Last year Malinowski completed a large commission for the foyer areas at the Rafael Viñoly designed Mathematical Institute, Oxford. “Spectral Flip” is a two part mural painted directly onto the south and the north facing walls, seemingly creating a luminous force field between them. http://www.antonimalinowski.co.uk

Reaction to space in time by means of art is the formula of 1+1+1, the exhibition format invented by Elena Quarestani, who invites three authors to cross paths with each other and with the history and identity of a factory transformed into a cultural laboratory.

But beyond the initial idea of asking an architect, a designer and an artist to make three original installations, the creative process has taken some inner, autonomous paths, in which I can be a witness and narrator, and only in some cases a prompter. Each author has applied his or her research to the space, but has also had to respect its structural constraints, its formal ambushes, through procedural but above all dialectic intentions triggered in the interaction between history and identity, on one side, and poetics and research on the other. The protagonists of this iteration are the American architect Johanna Grawunder, the Swiss designer Christoph Hefti, and the English painter of Polish origin Antoni Malinowski.

ASSAB ONE is not a neutral place, not a reticent space. It is a memory that can be activated, a theatre that can be turned on. This has promptly been understood by the three authors, who have intervened with their works without shying away from the tradition and the imaginary ASSAB ONE brings with it. Grawunder comes to terms with its scale, creating full and empty zones of a pathway through light; the inner perimeter has captured Malinowski, guiding the perception of his painting amidst fields and projections; Hefti, on the other hand, invades the place with a surreal bivouac full of materic stimuli. Natural actions that happen without calling on metaphor, simply entering into the history of a site that continues to experiment with the languages of visual culture.

Johanna Grawunder constructs a void to reflect on the excess of flows and signs in our time. As an architect, she cannot help but attempt to design a solution to this personal and common urgency. Nevertheless, the act of subtraction is in any case an addition, a tangible experience, an immersion in the darkness that is interrupted by two large luminous installations: two spaces to cross, two zones in which to come to grips with the work of art, two epicentres to pass through, where the starting point and the destination are not clear. Even more so, because in the middle there is a great gap, the void that is a strongly desired necessity. The pause between the moments of this itinerary is in fact a reminder of the spaces of existence, the recovery of time, the distance from things, the recouping of a healthy solitude in the scale of values to be reset in order to combat the extreme social milieu to which we are subjected and inured.

Alone Together is the title chosen by Grawunder for this constellation of elements. Inside, Let’s Get Lost, la suspended space in magenta-coloured wood and black lights, and Mandala,  the plastic and luminous representation of the universe in Hindu and Buddhist culture, both sculpt the space. Grawunder follows the notes of the syncopated jazz of Chet Baker, a style based on improvisation and counterpoint, not on the unison of musical phrases.

Antoni Malinowski orchestrates an intervention on architectural spaces, a new chapter of his research on the physical and metaphysical dimension of light. The sensitivity and reaction to light typical of his paintings are prompted by a mixture of pigments and nanotechnologies that alter the wavelengths of the visual spectrum of the human eye. The interaction of space, light – both natural and projected – and colour forms the core of the research the artist has conducted over time to investigate the dynamic relationship between pictorial space and designed space. This practice takes the form of wall paintings and works of large size. Malinowski observes the light of a place, distilling its genius loci and creating an interdependency of the immaterial nature of colour, movement and matter. The artist multiplies and changes the visual stimuli of the work, boosting the visual appeal, and above all encouraging prolonged viewing where time creates unity.

In the series of paintings Malinowski presents at ASSAB ONE there is a diptych based on a work from 1476 by Francesco Botticini. The Assumption of the Virgin can be seen at the National Gallery in London, and depicts the architecture of heaven as an order suspended over the Tuscan landscape. Malinowski creates a diptych that is not only a deconstructed inversion in space of that specific subject, but is also made with a painterly gesture totally bent on the creation of chromatic effects triggered by the refrections of the context. The concept of Almost seen – chosen by Malinowski as the title of the show – returns in the titles of the paintings, even slightly altered in Penumbra-Reflected, Almost described – caput mortuum, Also almost seen and is expressed in the dissolved, implied subject. The suspension, porousness, the passage from state to state, the suggestion of the skies of Tiepolo and Venetian atmospheres profoundly linked to the cinema experience of Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti, surface in the painter’s memory, marking his imaginary world and coming to life in his works.

Christoph Hefti uses material culture and craftsmanship to create a visual landscape made of objects. His background as a designer of fabrics active in the world of fashion emerges in a multisensory theatrical installation. At ASSAB ONE he sets up a surreal scene where rugs, ceramics and signs become opportunities for striking encounters between the author’s fantasy and the visitor’s reaction. The space is a visual, tactile and aural archipelago full of impressions, where the narration of human and animal figures is suggested because the experience is completed in the navigation of the space. Hefti brings his production catalogue into the show, almost entirely focused on the contemporary reinterpretation of traditional methods, from the hand-knotting of carpets in Nepal to the culture of Flemish pottery. A field of experiences with clear spiritual and oneiric overtones.

The installation  That horse, slamming doors relies on different media because he is accustomed to using them in his professional work as a designer. Here, however, he removes them from their context and the relationship that connects them is based on the desire to create an immersive, surprising work. Hefti’s mise en scène is a trap for dreamers, a welcoming space that encourages you to linger, to rest, to reawaken an imagination all too often dormant or even atrophied. Hefti is a commuter of creativity, between Zurich and Brussels, by way of Paris and Stockholm. Travel and the traditions of these places, where he experiments with materials and practices crafts, represent an explosive expressive background for him. An action that reminds us of the Cabaret Voltaire in its forms, and of Surrealism in its references. An activity that reflects the inner energy of its maker, and his habit of transforming it into performance.

The architect, painter and designer are the authors of a trilogy that starts from their research to create new works and to take part in the choral history of ASSAB ONE, writing a story in which the arts conquer space.