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The Louise Blouin Foundation has teamed up with Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery, one of the world’s leading design art dealers, in a collaborative exhibition titled Design High that will feature several of the most important and innovative artists in the field of contemporary design art. Design High will specifically address the tensions that exist between craft and fine art among some of the most innovative established and emerging artists in the field, including Marc Quinn, Pablo Reinoso, Thierry Dreyfus, Vincent Dubourg and Sebastian Brajkovic.

Spaghetti Bale by Pablo Reinoso

Working in an idiom that does not preclude a purpose beyond formalist or subjective aims, design art is both celebrated and dismissed for embracing some form of functionality or usefulness. In addition to pieces by some of the most established names in design art such as Marc Quinn and Thierry Dreyfus, the show will feature up-and-coming proponents of the genre that blur and manipulate the line between formalism and functionality.

Lathe 1 by Sebastian Brajkovic

Sebastian Brajkovic, a celebrated young artist whose works subvert the recognisable forms of historical styles of furniture into surreal and dysfunctional sculpture, will be represented, along with Vincent Dubourg, another artist who uses traditional and found objects, weaving into them the most elemental forms from nature: branches of trees blend with cases, bureaus, chairs, or even a staircase, giving both nature and the objects a new identity and a new functionality.

Tree Table Lamp by Atelier Van Lieshout

Other artists like Ingrid Donat work with more traditionally identifiable objects, but Donat casts these in bronze to create pieces of sculptural monumentality. Still others, like Marc Quinn revel in the tactile qualities of glacially-smooth Carrara marble, glass and metal, creating ostensibly functional objects that simultaneously feel far removed from the practical and the everyday.

Design High will be complimented by a series of educational events which form part of the ongoing Louise Blouin Foundation Education, Science and Creativity Programme. Panel discussions, lectures and workshops will explore the ties and tensions that exist between form and function in design art. Workshops will be led by the participating artists. Leading academics, curators and critics will deliver talks and discussions which explore themes related to current views on design as an art form, the market for design and the future of functional art in an international market.

Design High is currently on view at the Louise Blouin Foundation until August 30, 2009 at 3 Olaf Street, Holland Park, London. Tel: +44 20 7985 9600