For this first exhibition, Deborah Bowmann presents a series of objects and furniture that explore the businessman’s most private and intimate space: that of his bedroom. The exhibition features two four-poster beds, as well as the personal objects, of the two representatives of the gallery. For the duration of the exhibition, they will sleep in these beds, waking every morning to open the show under the gaze of the first passers-by.
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Deborah Bowmann Amsterdam, its gallery representatives and Deborah Bowmann herself are delighted to present
Blue Curtains, Black Coffee, the inaugural exhibition of the Amsterdam space. The show is a collaboration with
Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Heather and Rosetta, Jurjen Van Houte and Clémence Seilles.
For this first exhibition,
Deborah Bowmann presents a series of objects and furniture that explore the businessman’s most private and intimate space: that of his bedroom. The exhibition features two four-poster beds, as well as the personal objects, of the two representatives of the gallery. For the duration of the exhibition, they will sleep in these beds, waking every morning to open the show under the gaze of the first passers-by. Likewise, the pyjamas created by designer
Jurjen Van Houte will be worn by the gallery’s two representatives to sleep in, and will be folded up every morning and presented upon furniture designed for this express purpose.
The stands for the representatives’ pyjamas are a clue:
Blue Curtains, Black Coffee is conceived as a place of commerce, as a shop. The exhibition stages a ‘showcase’ – a representation of an idealised living space, subverted by its use in the gallery/shop setting. Floating between their actual use and potential use, the collection’s numerous products occupy an unstable position; they are both intimate objects, used and deteriorated by the gallery’s representative, and objects ‘on the market’, on sale and displayed as such.
This first exhibition at
Deborah Bowmann offers a rethinking of the aesthetic and the ideology of the businessman by proposing a subversive, alternate model. Rather than simply employing the aesthetic of technological modernisation from which the paradigmatic figure of the businessman emerged, the exhibition also embodies an aesthetic which employs raw design, utilizing traditional methods and rough materials such as natural wood, plaster, cement and marble. By referring both topologies,
Deborah Bowmann’s business man figure is erected at a point of convergence between 50s business aesthetics and arts and crafts aesthetics.
The exhibition develops rhythmically around repeated and serial objects.
Stéphane Barbier Bouvet presents a series of lamps, which are bent at diametrically opposed and yet identically sized angles. Bathed in this light,
Victor Delestre’s
Invisible Man series is displayed in a row of four, mimicking lines of industrial production.
Thus,
Deborah Bowmann invites sculptors and designers whose productions refuse to be constrained to the purity of a singular function. Resisting functionality,
Two-in-one bed, produced by
Deborah Bowmann, consists in two beds but of a single cumbersome object.
Clémence Seilles’ Seats pinpoint their function rather than fulfilling it, embodying such extremely minimalist forms that they may only exist for themselves.