Hostler Burrows x HB381's summer group show meditates on handmade objects

HB381 presents Hostler Burrows x HB381, a group exhibition on view from June 27 – August 15, 2025, featuring artists from Hostler Burrows' contemporary programme. The summer show includes works by Taher Asad-Bakhtiari, Zimra Beiner, Anne Brandhøj, Frida Fjellman and Sigve Knutson.

According to the New York-based gallery, for centuries, artisans and designers producing for the home as textile designers, glass blowers, woodworkers or ceramicists have navigated the often arbitrary divide between fine art and applied arts. This separation traces back to the 17th century, when the beaux arts were elevated above more functional or manual practices. While fine art championed conceptual and emotional expression, craft-based disciplines resisted the rise of industrialisation by emphasising the handmade. "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," as the show's press release informs.

Yet the distinctions between art, craft and design remain porous. Artists often cross these lines, engaging with domesticity, collaborative authorship and vernacular traditions to root contemporary practice in everyday life, what design historian Tanya Harrod calls 'lost modernisms'. These works "flourished on the margins of the art world and in the home, maintained in the hands of artists and craftspeople who found satisfaction in the process of making. They embodied a stance toward living with art that puts down roots in the quotidian rhythms of our familiar daily routines," they continue.

"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," mentions the exhibition text.

In the art and design exhibition, Beiner's rough-hewn and organic stoneware plant stands mimic botanical latticework and woven basketry through rough coils of clay and pooling glazes. A graduate of Alfred University's ceramics programme, Beiner embraces imperfection and ornament, conjuring forms that shift from every angle and evoke Gothic weathered cathedrals or ivy-covered buildings. "Craft has often been positioned as a rejoinder to factory assembly lines; here, drawing out that distinction, the standardisation of industrial production is confronted with an oozing, amorphous monolith to the imperfect, unfinished process of becoming, something entirely outside of mechanical logics," as the press release states.

Knutson, a Norwegian sculptor who was trained at the Design Academy Eindhoven, explores simplicity and spontaneity in his hand-built ceramic designs, which resemble whittled wood, roughly carved stone and sprayed concrete. Drawing on influences ranging from DIY construction videos to ancient building techniques, his Shotcrete series reinterprets sprayed concrete with an innovative application of pigmented unglazed stoneware. His process begins with gestural sketches and is guided by a belief in intuitive, minimal steps: "I just try to make objects with a few steps as possible," Knutson says.

Fjellman, a Swedish artist with a background in both ceramics and glass, blends vibrant colour with theatrical form. Trained at Stockholm's Konstfack and further honed at Pilchuck School of Glass and the Corning Glass Center, Fjellman creates luminous sculptures that combine hand-blown glass, brass chains and neon light. Her Dreamy Gas Cloud lamps bubble up from wooden bases, recalling their molten origins and evoking natural phenomena such as lightning or cloudbursts.

Asad-Bakhtiari's kilims and gabbeh weaves honour the 'the wellspring of collective labour within the Middle East’s tribal communities of weavers', especially the weaving traditions of nomadic artisans in Iran and Afghanistan, while subtly expanding on the medium's boundaries with elegant triangular and linear patterning. Open warps allow light to pass through his textiles, creating lace-like forms that animate space. His work reflects both a familial and cultural legacy: his great-aunt was the renowned sculptor Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, apart from a personal exploration of heritage through design.

Brandhøj, a Danish artist and woodworker, lets the natural character of timber guide her sculptural art, "allowing the cycles of growth and decay inherent to natural materials to guide her hand" as the press release mentions. Using offcuts of oak, walnut and Douglas fir, she highlights the material's innate features: a curling burl, a split in the grain or the arc of a branch. Her carved reliefs and functional objects often echo natural cycles of growth and decay, and "her regard for her material throughout the process is evident in each of her finely carved objects, which exhibit a curious weight and presence all their own," they add.