Josef Hoffmann
Musée d'Orsay
(from the Wikipedia page for Hoffmann)
Sterling Ruby
Stove 4, 2013
(in the retrospective exhibition at the
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston)
Josef Hoffmann did plenty of design objects that have a slender shape and pierced metal. I thought of Hoffmann when I saw the stove by Sterling Ruby last week in an exhibition at the ICA in Boston. Evocative attenuation. Hoffmann is quite widely exhibited but I particularly remember an exhibition that I saw with Christie at the Neue Galerie in New York City. One of the objects was my introduction to shagreen, an untanned rawhide now mostly produced from farmed Asian stingrays.
Sterling Ruby addresses climate change with his stoves which were featured in a 2015 exhibition at the Musée de la chasse et de la nature, held in conjunction with the Paris climate summit.
