Gold Queen 2009 / 2009

DESIGN OR ART?

“I am here to create an environment of love, live with passion, and make our most exciting dreams come true.”

Marcel Wanders is the enfant terrible of the international design scene. He does away with all rigid rules and cannot be pigeonholed. To put it shortly: Wanders is a liberator. As such, he gets down to work and frees the ideas of his exuberant imagination, translating them into projects that surely have more in mind beyond pure function. Only a creative mind like Wanders could come up with an idea such as the “One Minute Sculpture,” which he makes with his own hands and then gilds, as though on a production line. An homage to a golden handcraft and simultaneously a humorous critique of mass production.

Wanders is also an avowed fan of, to put it in his own words, the grandest design achievement of all time: evolution. With this in mind, his photographs Three Queens seem like fantastic portraits of three queen bees that complaisantly and stylishly or with cool distance rein over an “environment of love.” A honeycomb-like background alienates the quintessentially beautiful creatures.

“Photography is the most influential medium, I think. It makes the most bizarre realities look as normal as the girl next door, makes illusions accessible, and lets us feel connected to all the magnificent things the world has to offer,” according to Wanders, whose works can be seen in MoMA New York, MoMA San Francisco, and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Horst Klöver