After a successful collaboration of twenty years with Studio Job, widely known for their exuberant and luxuriously executed products and installations, Dutch designer and artist Nynke Tynagel recently started a solo practise. Chances are high that you’ve dried your dishes with her jacquard tea towel, patterned with insects or skeletons, or rested your body on equally rich fabric blossoming with fruit trees, tractors, and farm animals.
Looking at the work, one may assume that Tyangel’s crystal clear graphics are informed by the ligne claire, a style of drawing created and pioneered by Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist and creator of The Adventures of Tintin. But Tynagel, instead of being influenced by the language of comics, is inspired by the artistic environment in which she was raised. With a father working for the Dutch mill De Ploeg, known for characteristically modern fabrics, and a mother freelancing as a pattern designer, young Tynagel was surrounded by flatness, colour, and graphic abstraction.
Her sensitive attention to visual motifs had already begun to bloom when she arrived at Design Academy Eindhoven. While a student there, she met Job Smeets, and they soon started to work together, transforming many wild “Design Art” ideas into objects and exploring myriad techniques and materials.
Much of Tynagel’s early work is characterized by the horror vacui—Latin for the fear of empty spaces. In recent work, it still reigns supreme. Compositions of kitchen sink cupboards and fuse boxes made for Sidedish Projects, along with the Forever Young series Tynagel designed for Cibone gallery in Tokyo, are literally filled to the brim. Common objects from daily life are lovingly transformed into icons, representing, for example, the ultimate green plastic watering can. Even the smallest and most trivial of objects—like a pencil sharpener or a pot of wood glue—become actors on the two-dimensional stages she creates.
When the ideal, iconic "thing" can't be found in her image archive or online, Tynagel creates her own by compiling elements from various, less perfect ones. She pairs classic objects like the Black+Decker Workmate workbench (easily found in most garages) or an orange Brabantia cookie jar from the 1970s with utensils and tools, like a traditional Dutch Boerenbont cup. A disposable dispenser for glass cleaner is transformed into an object of beauty, lending colour to the many other objects in the background. Since the early days, Tynagel’s tool of choice is the vector line. Using Adobe Illustrator, she precisely rescales and recomposes detailed illustrations without distortion or loss of quality.
Assignments sometimes require a different approach. Rather than start with an object of her choosing, Tynagel imagines a character or plays out a thought experiment in order to find the right elements to fit the assignment. Her poster for the art, antiques, and design fair PAN Amsterdam portrays the fictitious wunderkammer, or curio cabinet, of an imagined collector couple. Another series, depicting an old Mercedes Benz camper van and its many contents, was based on Dutch ceramic designer Floris Wubben's messy family snapshots from summer holidays.
In painting, Tynagel has found a new medium that requires the exploration of novel techniques and materials. Creating space for the viewer's imagination, the empty space in the Blank Canvas series takes the physical form of an empty laptop screen, a fresh sheet of paper on a table surface, or the proverbial empty canvas on an easel. Yet by staying true to her themes and working methods, project after project, Tynagel incorporates the entire material world into a growing visual library of things, to be endlessly combined in joyous new settings and colourful constellations.
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