In the Desert

The title of this collection produced by Design Gallery Milano” could be, most optimistically, an homage to the California modernists operating in places like Palm Springs a generation ago. In the work of Frey, Neutra, and Lautner, among others, she has found an affinity with her experiments in Italy over the past ten years using industrial materials in honest, even naïve ways. Like these architects, she has little interest in celebrating technique as an end in itself or in self-consciously expressing the cleverness of the ingredients of her creations. Instead, like the desert modernists, her work embodies a strong vision about a way of living. Space, for her, is never just some kind of neutral good-taste backdrop. She proposes a more direct, even confrontational relationship with the objects that surround us.

The pieces in her current show seem to levitate in the room. Suspended with cables from the ceiling, clinging precariously to wall, they allude to a state of isolation from the world around them. To enter into the presence of Johanna Grawunder’s work is to enter into a world disconnected from specific references. In that sense, it is probably a mistake interpret the title of the collection as comment on that other desert, the very ancient and rich one, where the world currently focuses its undivided attention. These works are indeed political, even ethical statements but they are aimed much more broadly than at current events. They are aimed at a cultural desert.

In the end, Grawunder  says, they are only lights and some furniture, tucked tentatively into the contemporary landscape. But they are not so passive. They demand that we engage our surroundings.

Mark Jensen, 2003