Hanging Around
17.07.2010 - 10.10.2010
Collab Gallery, first floor, Perelman Building, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fairmount and Pennsylvania Avenues, Philadelphia, PA 19130, USA
In the 1950s, Poul Henningsen, a Danish industrial designer and architect, created a series of hanging lamps that explored a variety of ways of diffusing and reflecting light. His 1958 PH Artichoke lamp is composed of staggered and stacked reflectors in a configuration that resembles, as its name suggests, an artichoke. Throughout the late twentieth century, designers worked with a range of materials, some of them new, like plastic, and some of them merely low tech materials adapted to a new purpose. The Italian artist Bruno Munari s Falkland lamp, conceived in 1964, is an elegant undulating column of elasticized fabric.In more recent years, designers most notably Ingo Maurer, of Germany have experimented with new lighting technologies. One of Maurer s most technically advanced creations is the 2003: Wo bist du, Edison? (Where Are You, Edison?) lamp. A 360 degree holographic image of a light bulb projects onto a transparent cylindrical shade, while the actual source of the lamp s light is a halogen bulb hanging above the shade, hidden in a socket in the shape of Thomas Edison s profile.Hanging Around, drawn from the Museum s extensive collection of modern and contemporary design, features some twenty hanging lamps. |
September 2010
