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In complement to her past couture collaborations with Maharam, Hella Jongerius is now designing true performance textiles, making her work accessible to a broad audience, while still preserving her unique approach to color, material, and narrative. Confetti and Trees are the latest additions to this ongoing effort.
With shifting motifs, Confetti and Trees bring movement to the textile surface. Through color blocking and scattered placement, Confetti creates the illusion of spheres in motion foregrounded on a solid matte surface. Trees, rendered as a mass of hatch marks, charts seasonal transitions through its palette. Jongerius' dynamic material and color pairings are evident in both Confetti and Trees. The textiles combine metallic nylon yarn with wool, which adds an atmospheric quality through natural color variation, creating depth and textural contrast to great effect.
Hella Jongerius has been a standout in the world of product design since her early work for Droog, the Dutch design collective, and now as Jongeriuslab, where material research largely determines design direction. Her unique approach to craft from the perspective of industry, and her ability to combine these seemingly oppositional modes of production, has allowed her to create individuality on a mass scale. Her designs are typified by contextual twists, historical archetypes, and by transformations from old to new. Jongerius' work ranges from one-offs and limited editions exhibited at galleries to consumer products available through companies like Vitra, Nymphenburg, Royal Tichelaar Makkum, and IKEA to industrial design and interior spaces with projects including the cabin interiors for Dutch airline KLM and a redesign of the United Nations' North Delegates'; Lounge, where she worked with a team of artists and designers including Rem Koolhaus, Irma Boom, Gabriel Lester, and theorist Louise Schouwenberg.
Two of the products designed by Jongerius in collaboration with Maharam, Repeat (2002) and Layers (2008), are part of the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. The embroidered book cover she designed for Maharam Agenda recently received a European Design Award.
Confetti by Hella Jongerius
Width: 54"/137cm
Colors: 9
Content: 51% Cotton, 27% Nylon, 22% Wool
Trees by Hella Jongerius
Width: 53"/135cm
Colors: 9
Content: 55% Cotton, 28% Nylon, 17% Wool