Anyone who follows Willy Iffland on Instagram might think that his daily life revolves mainly around trainers, collaborations and the camera. However, when you meet him in person, it quickly becomes clear that this surface-level impression tells only a small...
...In Leipzig the Christmas biscuits and gingerbreads have reappeared on the supermarket shelves, a sure sign of not only the increasingly aggressive commercialisation of Yuletide celebrations that one can't help thinking surely used to have another, long since forgotten, function, an origin beyond profit and gluttony; but also the surest of signs that summer is on its way out... As is the news that the Grassimesse Jury have decreed who have been invited to present their works at the 2025 Grassimesse Leipzig...
...In their current exhibition the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, concern themselves with Futures, specifically with the Material and Design of Tomorrow... Material and Design of Tomorrow's chapter Ready Made Future and its discussions on, and introductions to, the great many alternative materials that already exist, and in cases of materials such as, for example, seaweed or the hemp employed by Leipzig based FUSE Composites for a unidirectional tape, a fundamental component of providing strength to lightweight constructions of the type, in all probability, we will increasingly rely on, have been used by humans for centuries...
...Tracing its (hi)story back to 1920, and having featured over the years and decades works by some of the more prominent and important designers, applied artists and crafters of the 20th and 21st centuries, Leipzig's annual Grassimesse has not only an established place in the international creative calender but an established reputation for the quality of the works it presents... And should your application be accepted, then, aside from the opportunity to present, and sell, your work in the exhibition halls of Leipzig's Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, and to be part of Grassimesse (hi)story, there are also 6 Grassi Prizes to be won, including the smow-Designpreis, now in it third year and worth €2,500 to the winner...
...The 2023 edition of the Grassimesse Leipzig will see the inaugural awarding of the €2,500 smow-Designpreis... Back in 1923 the Grassimesse1 was still, mirroring the Leipzig Messe it sought to be a high-quality alternative to, a biannual event, featuring in 1923 a spring edition in early March and an autumn edition in the first week of September...
..."1 So pronounced the accompanying brochure to the exhibition "Modelle für die industrielle Gestaltung von der Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Dresden" - Models for industrial design from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Dresden - which opened in the African Room of the Grassi Leipzig Ethnography Museum2 on March 4th 1951... The exhibition in Leipzig took place not only in context of the 1951 Leipzig Spring Trade Fair, the Frühjahrsmesse, an event that the East German government traditionally used to underscore their superiority to the West, but also shortly after the publication of the first East German Five Year Plan, a situation that naturally called for a certain bravado on the part of the ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED)...
...In 1965 Verner Panton wowed Cologne with his flying chair concept before in 1967 the, arguably, defining moment in Verner Panton's career was reached when Vitra released the eponymous Panton Chair; a product that so violently altered what we understood about furniture that although initially only produced until 1979, its influence remains unbroken to this today...
