Side Gallery

Xavier Mañosa, founder of studio Apparatu, talks about his creative process and his recent ceramic collection for Side Gallery, a project consisting in combining ceramics with various materials to create new expressive forms of expression.

Looking for alternatives to build functional furniture in native materials, Jaramillo and the weavers of Fango discovered the renewable Yaré fiber. Yaré is a fiber commonly called “vine”, a root that grows around the trunks of trees in the Colombian Amazon. These fibers are used by local indigenous communities in southern Colombia for handcrafted weaving, which inspired Jaramillo to translate the native aesthetics and geometries of primitive wooden objects into a new collection using sustainable materials to create the neo-folk furniture collection, Ibuju.

The work of women played a significant role in the creation of this triangular rug, as its primary objective was to provide sustainable employment opportunities for them, recognizing their expertise in transmitting various weaving techniques and ensuring they received a fair wage for their work.

The rug, featured in the video, took five months to complete and represents a fusion of different Afghan local groups with contemporary design. It reinterprets local methods, the transmission of practices, and their reinvention, all in collaboration with the designer.

We visit the studio of Gyuhan Lee in Seoul (Korea) where he produces exclusively for Side Gallery the McDonald's Paperbags Lighting Collection, transforming recycled paper bags into lighting sculptures. ‘During the lockdown period, I noticed how often I would order food to be delivered to my studio, especially McDonald’s. Since I often ate it, I came up with the idea to work with its paper bags. With this series, I tried to express my personal taste and my consumerism patterns by using McDonald’s paper bags as my material,’ Gyuhan says.

Capturing the essence of Frederik Nystrup-Larsen (b.1992 Copenhagen) & Oliver Sundqvist’s (b.1991 Copenhagen), Tai Chi inspired series, Soft Boxing, Side Gallery presents a short video of the collection, exhibited in the Barcelona gallery. Ten new luminous sculptures composed of stainless steel structures, a relief of acrylic knit, and fluorescent LED pipes, illustrate the immemorial Chinese martial art, translating the flowing movements of the body and mind into material objects.

Side Gallery’s first solo exhibition with the French designer Elissa Lacoste, “Infinito Viviente”, is on view at Side Gallery, Barcelona, until 14th February. The exhibition took its title from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and alludes to the vibrant atmosphere of a speculative and immersive underwater landscape that characterised Elissa’s collection.

Produced exclusively for Side Gallery, this sixteen square-meter rug, shown in the video was woven in Afghanistan by semi-settled nomads, using 100% natural merino wool. The rug required five months to produce, and the designer has innovatively combined several different weaving techniques: Gabbeh, kilim and warp-exposed.

This bookcase by Gerlado de Barros is a unique masterpiece. Produced by Unilabor in 1955, and commissioned for the family home of one of its members, the bookcase is the only one if its size ever to be made. Composed of jacaranda wood with brass details, and an iron structure, the bookcase model is adaptable and capable of infinite configurations. The versatility and assembly possibilities allow for a multitude of utilisation purposes, the kind of ingenuity most representative of the production philosophy of Unilabor.

In conjunction with the launch of the publication, NO FEAR OF GLASS, Side Gallery released a short film of the making of the exhibition. The film features the exhibition’s designer, Sabine Marcelis, who talks us through the concept and process’ leading the to the creation of the emblematic exhibition, held at the Barcelona Pavilion in December 2019.

Marcelis explains how through the use of material and production experimentation, each of her five original works create surprising applications, perfect in form, that translate the materiality and ideology of the Pavilion.

Exploring the elements of light and reflection, Catalan artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané has collaborated with Side Gallery to produce a series of blown glass chandeliers, tracing the boundary of nature and artifice. The intervention holds a powerful force of attraction: a moment of uncertainty between what is contrived and what is natural. In each of the artist's intricate compositions, we are able to experience this concept, far from being distinct, the organic and the geometric, the necessary and the abstract, define each other.

In collaboration with Side Gallery and Massimo Dutti, the Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis realised the installation “Splendour” at the Fashion brands flagship Store in the city center. Sabine Marcelis a designer represented by Side Gallery grew up in New Zealand surrounded by nature. Sensitive to the light of the sky, the ocean and the snow on the mountains, the artist was always inspired the communication of natural elements. Her work is reflective of these beautiful moments, which she tries to capture but on a smaller scale, as objects or installations.

"The interior and exterior architecture was a continuation of the architect’s colorful trajectory, as well as the harmonization of his work with the surrounding nature"

Side Gallery entered the colourful eccentric world of Barcelona – born architect and designer Guillermo Santomá on a rare visit to the designer’s playground – his studio. Side gallery and Guillermo’s history encompasses solo shows, both at the countryside gallery, Casavells, and the Barcelona based gallery. Santomà’s originality and raw material experimentation nourishes the galleries desire to promote the new sensations of the design world who constantly seek to investigate innovative forms, materials and techniques.

Casavells is a unique almost hidden space in the Catalonian region of L’Empordà, set in an antique masía (farmhouse) built in the XVIII century that brings together a harmonic coexistence between art, craft and design. Committed to innovation and tradition, the gallery collects, preserves, and promotes modern and contemporary art and design, whilst exploring ideas across cultures through dynamic curatorial initiatives and collaborations. Casavells 2020 promoted a younger generation of designers born after 1980, exploring new techniques, materials and sensations of the design world. Alongside the display of cutting edge colorful organic forms, the 2020 edit dedicated a room to a collective exhibition of craft including works by contemporary basket makers from around the world, promoting and preserving ancient techniques, as well as experimenting with new and innovative weaves.

Openhouse magazine contacted Side Gallery to generate an intervention with the gallery’s contemporary designer Sabine Marcelis. The collaboration between the Gallery and magazine resulted in an artist’s installation at the iconic Spanish vacation home Solo Office, designed by architects Kersten Geers and David Van Severen. With the trajectory of time as the central concept, the perfectly circular building was the perfect setting for Marceli’s to experiment with the relationship between light and time.

On the occasion of the third Concéntrico, a festival of architecture and design held in Logroño, La Rioja in Spain, the Barcelona based architect and designer Guillermo Santomà was commissioned to restore the patio of the cloister at the church Santa Maria de Palacio. Represented by Side Gallery, Santomà proposed to fictionally complete the renovations carried out by Gerado Cuadra from 1988 to 1966.