Exhibition Details

HB381 is pleased to announce Hostler Burrows x HB381, a group show of works from Hostler Burrows' contemporary program. Featured artists will include Taher Asad-Bakhtiari, Zimra Beiner, Anne Brandhøj, Frida Fjellman, and Sigve Knutson.
Artisans and designers producing for the home, whether as textile designers, glass blowers, woodworkers, or ceramicists, have long had to traverse the thorny boundary between applied arts and fine arts. It is a distinction that arguably emerged in the 17th century when the beaux arts were severed from other more manual and utilitarian forms of labor. Cleaving to lofty intellectual ideals, the fine arts consolidated around conceptual and emotional expressions of individuality; meanwhile, limited-run furniture designers and craft-based artisans offered an alternative to the industrial practices with their reliance on mechanical reproduction. As factory assembly developed its own verticals for production and distribution, carefully handcrafted pieces of design were conferred a status at once spiritual and honest, direct and functional — qualities advocated for by Arts and Crafts leaders like Ruskin and Morris.
The artists and designers in this exhibition invoke the luminous boundary between visual wonder and the workaday, inviting prosaic forms — flat-weave rugs, table lamps, and plant stands, to name a few — to quiver with the particular hum of the handmade. They offer a philosophical meditation on objects as vehicles for comfort, utility, desire, and rumination.