The third edition of Madrid Design Festival is an international event that wants to convert Madrid into the capital of design and elevate the city to a privileged position on the international arena. The festival is held in February and will encompass all design disciplines, from architecture to graphic design, communications to interior design, all of them hybridising into a contemporary and innovative format.
Madrid Design Festival is a widespread project that infiltrates every corner of the city, becoming the very best tool to democratize design and transmit the importance of this discipline that transforms our lives each and every day. A language capable of generate methodologies, change mentalities, positively alter our environment and, above all, redesign the world.
And to do so, Madrid Design Festival proposes a cross-disciplinary programme to showcase creations both from leading designers and new young professionals. The Festival works to convert Madrid, every February, into a city-wide celebration, opening the season during which the city becomes a cutting-edge space in the fields of design and creativity, with world-renowned events.
Since its inception, Madrid Design Festival, devised and created by La Fábrica under the direction of Álvaro Matías, has worked in collaboration with an advisory committee made up of independent experts specialized in different fields.
Listone Giordano is excited to be part of the very first exhibition devoted to Partricia Urquiola in Madrid mainly focuses on her work as a designer, showing her works for industrial production, occasionally for craft production and frequently for the cross between them both.
The exhibition is laid out in a non-chronological way, gathering the pieces around six still life paintings that explore a series of recurrent themes in her line of work and mindset. These six still life paintings are inspired by Dalí’s painting Nature Morte Vivante, where the objects are depicted in motion, breathing life into them.
The exhibition revolves around the following pillars: “Transparent things” brings together a collection of objects that have been important throughout his career, a connection between the past and the future; the so-called “Empathic Journeys” between concepts and projects; the concept of “Resistances”, projects where there is some kind of tension; matters related to gender and all its declensions, a theme called “Gender? What Gender?”; and the positive pollination in the creative process reflected in the “Contaminations” part.
The exhibition shows products from the different stages in Urquiola’s career. She founded her own studio in 2001 and designed furniture, carpets, lamps, tableware, vases, fabrics, bathtubs, pottery and tiles, etc. The items reveal her way of tackling different materials and techniques, with inventiveness, creativity and a fresh approach that helps her break away from the traditional standards and often helps her find new answers to old problems.
Her interest in color is the ongoing theme of the exhibition and is expressed through moments of rigor or exuberance, while the concern for sustainability is observed in the recurrent use of “Upcycling”, by means of pieces in which recycled materials are reused to produce new objects.
