Play Time: Maarten Baas’ playful ponderings at Carpenters Workshop Gallery

A retrospective showcase illuminating Maarten Baas’ impressions on the passage of time, reality and fantasy, as well as the wonder of childlike innocence, Play Time, at the Los Angeles space of the Carpenters Workshop Gallery, is the Dutch designer’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast of the United States. On view from February 14 - 26 May 2023, the show opened to the public during this year’s edition of the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles. Uniting works from a host of his previous ventures, the show demonstrates the constant conflict between growing up and remaining a child at heart that Baas embraces in his practice.

Bringing together pieces from earlier collections in the contemporary Dutch designer’s illustrious career, including Real Time, Clay, and Close Parity, the principal focal point of the former collection, as seen in the exhibition, is a series of timepieces of varying scale—from full-sized grandfather clocks to smaller children’s clocks. Infusing their product designs with a sense of whimsy, typical of his outlook on making, rooted in playful and purposeful naivety, Baas’ work straddles the boundary between art and design, attempting to “reverse the natural flow of time and rekindle the wonder of childhood within an adult environment,” as per the organisers. Alternatively, the latter collection’s offerings play with the boundary of the illogical, bringing flatness to a three-dimensional environment.

Where Baas’ choice of subject intrigues on its own, it is what he has done with said objects—literal markers of temporal flow in the modern age—that impresses even more. Already renowned for his iconic style which radiates an innate childlike wonder and honesty, Baas’ seemingly jovial and Peter Pan-esque perspective on design conceals a level of technical skill that can rival and perhaps outshine many of his peers. Expertly making use of traditional mediums such as metalwork and ceramics in tandem with newer ones such as videography, Baas’ ideas are rendered in a manner that is at times, closer to conceptual art than functional or collectible design.

Having graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven back in 2002, Baas is a leading creative who bridges mediums of product design, furniture design, conceptual art, installation art, and performance art, with a keen eye for craftsmanship. Incorporating elements of each of these mediums (sometimes simultaneously), into his style which is provocative, defiant, thought-provoking, and theatrical, Baas’ work is part of numerous private museum collections such as MoMA in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, San Francisco MoMA, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. His associations with major brands such as Swarovski, Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Berluti serve to cement this, carving out a unique niche for himself that transcends classifications within the realms of art and design.

One of the most prominent pieces on display is Baas’ Real Time Grandfather Clock - The Son. A rugged, worn-in aesthetic is reflected in the piece, which has been assembled using planks of textured wood, in the style of a treehouse built by children. Beneath this layer of the design is a functional dimension, which utilises a digital clock face to render a looping performance of Baas dressed up as a child, constantly updating the movement of the clock’s hands in colourful paints inside the body of the clock. Combining nostalgia, a mixture of mediums, and an intellectual slant on the simple act of timekeeping, this piece invokes Baas’ fondness for adding a performative element to his work.

Supplementing this as part of the exhibition, are a few more pieces from the Real Time series. Among them, Real Time XL The Artist, is a twist on the ideas put forth by The Son, portraying Baas as an adult inside an oversized and more contemporary clock face, resembling an indoor pavilion or cubicle of sorts. Creating the illusion of being a ‘room-within-a-room,’ the work features the figure of Baas inside the clock, standing as he would in his own atelier, with a bare upper torso and paint in his hand, redrawing the clock’s hands as the moments pass by, where his own bodily movements fluctuate and harmonise with the clock hands. In this scenario, “The question remains as to whether he is in control of time itself, or if time is controlling him,” notes the gallery.

Next comes the Children's Clocks, an intensive project that took the aid of 720 children to create a unique drawing for each minute of the day—an exceptionally detailed and radical work that required months of planning, preparation, and execution. Baas requested each of the children to draw the hands of a clock corresponding to a particular moment. Each of these pieces is accompanied by housing that extends the language of Baas’ iconic Clay collection, with a limited run of 101 units. The organisers state, “Throughout his Real Time series, we see Baas simultaneously keeping time moving relentlessly forward, minute by minute, while at the same time regressing his characters through earlier and earlier stages of his life.”

The exhibition pairs these works with pieces from the Close Parity collection, consisting of large bronze cabinets that pay tribute to shapes that are both sculptural and conventionally impractical for their use in contemporary design applications. “The artist used spontaneous sketches to inform the final shape of the Close Parity artworks; top-heavy, asymmetrical, cabinets that do not tip over but instead seem to effortlessly defy gravity,” shares the gallery. Even though the pieces may seem heavy-handed and almost crudely shaped at first glance, the delicate precipice on which each of them is poised—visually unstable but structurally sound—is a testament to the humour ingrained in Baas’ work, teetering on the edge of the absurd and impossible.

With this first solo showcase on the West Coast, the artist and designer are bringing his incredible depth and diversity of thought to a whole new audience, introducing many to the revolutionary ideas contained in his oeuvre. As a whole, Play Time is emblematic of Maarten Baas’ capacity to resist type casting and categorisation, as a creative whose imagination truly knows no bounds.

Play Time is on view till 26 May 2023, at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Los Angeles.