DESIGN CHINA BEIJING
National Agricultural Exhibition Centre
On the occasion of Design China Beijing 2020, one of Asia's leading international design event run from 23rd to 26th September, Gufram partners with Global Design Distribution to present the new Broken Series designed by New York practice Snarkitecture. Starting from Broken Mirror, the first ever mirror produced by Gufram, the Broken Series is enriched with the new Broken Square Mirror and the new Broken Bench. The new pieces are showcased together with Gufram’s most iconic pieces in a set-up conceived especially for the Beijing fair.
Designed by Gufram to highlight the Radical soul of the brand, declined in all its different souls represented by the many pieces produced by Gufram over the years, the booth is realised to astonish and surprise the visitors, walking them through the rich history of the brand and its fantastic worlds.
The most important Gufram icons – Bocca, Cactus, Sassi, Massolo, Magritta, the Attica series, Capitello, Detecma – mix with some of the new pieces like The Broken Series in a scenography inspired by Surrealist and Metaphisycal paintings: the background mimics the colonnade of a portico where all the domestic sculptures find their place in a surreal, radical environment underlining the radical spirit of the company and its DNA.
The focus of the Broken Series, the new collection presented in Beijing for the first time to the public, is the development of a contemporary radical idea working on the versatility of polyurethane, the material made famous by Gufram through its various out-of-the-box projects. Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham, the masterminds behind Snarkitecture, played ironically with the idea of ambiguity by relying on the concept of "soft/not soft" using the polyurethane to mimic concrete. The polyurethane used for the collection is refined entirely by hand by Gufram’s craftsmen, so every object is slightly different and therefore unique, and also entirely Made in Italy. The effect similar to the texture of the wall is created using Guflac, a special patented paint from Gufram that is spread entirely by hand, enabling the polyurethane to maintain its elasticity, allowing for a unique aesthetic experimentation.
