SENSORY BONDS BETWEEN ART AND DESIGN: KALPA AND MOLTENI&C IN NEW YORK AND MIAMI

Within an intuitive relation, architecture, design and art connect, communicating ideas and emotions, and engaging us through their material and conceptual qualities.

KALPA's curated art selection within the Molteni&C flagship stores in New York and Miami plays a crucial role in shaping the ambiance of these Vincent Van Duysen-designed locations, embedding a strong sense of refinement and belonging. Art transforms these interiors, encouraging visitors to explore new perspectives for reimagining their daily space and connecting with the designed environment in a more personal way.

This overall project offers unique ways to discover and to collect contemporary artworks in dialogue with Italian design. The result is a layered space of interaction between the objects and the viewers, embracing a sense of timeless aesthetic, featuring minimal and elegant forms, and fostering values of high craftsmanship and sophistication.

Invited artists Federico Gori, Konrad Koppold, Guillem Nadal, and Sabine Pagliarulo exhibit works that blend creative vision, natural inspiration, and ancient wisdom. From solitary icons of profound mastery, such as Pagliarulo’s ceramic maternal forms and Koppold’s totemic oakwood figures, to the botanical landscapes like Gori’s copper polyptychs, and the conceptual yet tactile maps of Nadal's paintings, the corpus of art objects introduces diverse narratives and individualities.

Like cartography, Mallorca-based multidisciplinary artist Nadal’s work on canvases and wood explores the limits of abstract language while revealing intimate and often unknown natural places, searching for human sensations of melancholy and harmony. His art represents a unique present moment in life, when micro and macro, light and darkness, creative impetus, and meditation merge to find an unexpected visual equilibrium. The textural consistency of these exhibited paintings with bold streaks stretching across the canvas is reminiscent of the artist’s sculptural and installation work, created with natural and organic materials.

"Beauty can be anything. It can be something that comes from nature. It can be a beautiful conversation. It can be art that opens up your mind and connects with your soul, and makes you happy. It is vital for humanity."

Italian artist Gori’s engravings and oxidations on copper are part of the landmark series entitled Estinti, Perenne and Pattern. Aiming to capture the secret code and signs of Nature, across its biodiversity and evolutionary journey, these polyptychs hold repeated patterns, displaying a highly symbolic minimal landscape of memories of fossils, current and extinct plants. While working with copper, the concepts of unpredictability and the lack of control over the final artwork are key aspects of this artist's poetics, developing around the impossibility for man to rule time or completely dominate matter, which often eludes all human logic. As in a dance between two souls, the artist’s gesture is continued by the ineluctable evolution of the material itself.

German sculptor Koppold masterfully explores the concepts of asymmetry, contrasting elements and the essence of wood, balancing form, colour and texture. Reflecting a clean design while highlighting the organic textures of the tree, his thin-walled vessels in oak wood are intended as metaphysical devices that carry the human soul. The inception of a shape transcends the limits of the technique, leading Koppold to express his spiritual and professional awareness in the containing form. From an aesthetic perspective, embracing a clear combination of opposites, the artist navigates in the terrain of softness and rigidity, lightness and heaviness.

Italian ceramicist Pagliarulo presents essential forms in stoneware and porcelain, capable of interpreting feelings of life and nourishment. These are primordial wombs, warm and protected shells, continuous embraces without interruption, perceivable in every form created. From round shapes poised to open, smooth and uninterrupted, to hives, Pagliarulo's works present a succession of concave and convex surfaces, spontaneous intersections, and experiments. As the artist's chosen medium, clay reflects the archetypal bond between human beings and Mother Earth. But above all, it represents the reclaiming of a space for exquisitely feminine creation.

The interplay of shadows and lights, the fluid nuanced movement of colour and the tapestry of diverse textural surfaces create a sophisticated and warm space, an environment meant to inspire wonder and awe. Like a subtle thread, these artworks guide visitors through the interiors, revealing new and intriguing connections between the artists represented by KALPA and designers creating for Molteni&C.

A R T  L O C A T I O N S :


MOLTENI&C NEW YORK FLAGSHIP STORE

160 Madison Avenue, New York NY

+1 (212) 673-7106 | info.newyork@moltenigroup.com

MOLTENI&C MIAMI FLAGSHIP STORE

Miami District Design, 4100 NE 2nd Avenue, Suite 103, Miami FL

+1(786)6521500 | info.miami@moltenigroup.com

C R E D I T S :


Photography: Daniel Civetta @danielcivetta for KALPA

Quote: Vincent Van Duysen

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