Tag Archives: Anatxu Zabalbeascoa

Craft experts convene in Madrid

On 22nd January, the LOEWE Foundation and the IED organised a talk on the subject of contemporary craft that brought together some of the most relevant names in design, craft, architecture, journalism, and curation, including Antonia Boström, Sara Flynn, Ramón Puig Cuyàs, Joonyong Kim, and Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, all of them linked to the LOEWE Craft Prize.  Personal experiences, reflections on current creativity, and main sources of inspiration were some of the highlights of this fascinating panel discussion, which took place in English in front of an audience of 120 people.

Anatxu Zabalbeascoa – Journalist, Art Historian, and President of the LOEWE Craft Prize Jury – moderated a discussion among experts as diverse as their roles in today’s craft. The event led to an enjoyable conversation where a number of relevant topics were discussed, including the transition from traditional to artistic craftsmanship, or the importance that beauty and contemporary creation hold in today’s world.

The pieces created by jeweller Ramón Puig Cuyàs, which have been showcased internationally since 1972, are now prominently featured in public and private collections alike. He has been the recipient of the Herbert Hoffman of Munich Award, the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona Special Award or the Danish Craft Bogprice, amongst others. His career, which includes ample teaching experience, has rewarded him with a wisdom he readily transmits in his conversations and speeches.

Antonia Boström –Director of Collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London- spent more than twenty years working in American art museums before returning to the V&A, where her professional career had begun. She has carried out extensive research in the field of sculpture and is a prolific writer in this artistic field. Joonyong Kim is a professor at Cheongju University and a 2018 LOEWE Craft Prize finalist. The work produced by this Korean leading glass artist has been shown in individual and collective exhibitions worldwide. Irish potter Sara Flynn, who was one of the finalists in the first LOEWE Craft Prize, went on to become a member of the Experts Panel in the following two editions. Thanks to her work, for which she is known internationally, Flynn has participated in many artistic retreats abroad, and has had a prolific career as a guest speaker and jury member of numerous craft contests.

A meeting of artists who were not shy in showing their strongest creative weapons. Following their interventions, they answered a large number of questions and received congratulatory feedback from a diverse audience that filled the Aula Magna of the IED Madrid headquarters.

Photo Captions: Antonia Boström talks about her work in the presence of Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, Ramón Puig Cuyàs, Joonyong Kim, and Sara Flynn. Ramón Puig Cuyàs. Sara Flynn and Joonyong Kim © Álvaro Tomé for the LOEWE Foundation.

John Allen, the emotion of colours

The wise and relaxed conversation between John Allen and journalist Anatxu Zabalbeascoa -leading the LOEWE Talks titled A bag is a landscape– inundated recently the emblematic LOEWE store in Gran Vía, Madrid, and the Galería LOEWE in Barcelona. Using the patterns previously created by British knitter and master weaver John Allen, Jonathan Anderson -LOEWE’s Creative Director- has designed a new collection. Allen’s flat drawings -created to be hung on the walls, as carpets- have developed into accessories. “I couldn’t imagine my designs as three-dimmensional objects”, said Allen. Besides beach towels and totes, Allen’s colours have reached wallets, key-rings or espadrilles. The John Allen Collection, with British landscapes drifting towards abstraction, reveal the understanding between Allen and Anderson. “We trusted each other”, explains Allen. “It was like giving him my baby”.

CornishHarbour

Designer, craftsman, weaver… Allen does not care what other people call him. “I see myself as an artist, but that could seem very pretentious. I generate ideas for others”, he insists with remarkable humbleness. Moreover, he gets inspired “from everything” but his main creative source is colour. “Colours make me emotional, it´s about pushing boundaries”, he says. But as an artistic tool, explains Allen, “colour cannot be taught, we cannot learn to enjoy colours”. Allen has taught at the Royal College of Art, whose knitting department he also founded, until his retirement in 1989.

Allen&Zabalbescoa

John Allen is an expert in reinventing himself, and he admits to keep certain “freshness” towards his work, perhaps emphasised by “having been working with younger people for so long”. “People never chase, never move on”, he complains. “I am somebody whose attitude has changed over the years. I am a man of the future”. When Zabalbeascoa asked him how we will perceive this collection in the next years, Allen was lost in thought, as if thinking ahead. Then he smiled and said: “I think it will age quite well”. Among all his works, Falling Leaves is “my favourite design I have ever done”. That’s why he carries his bag everywhere, because -he laughs- everytime somebody stops and says, ‘Oh! Where is that great bag from?’”.

FallingLeaves

Photographs: Cornish Harbour beach towel and canvas Falling Leaves duffle, John Allen Collection Spring Summer 2015 © LOEWE, 2015. LOEWE Talks A bag is a landscape with John Allen and Anatxu Zabalbeascoa at Galería LOEWE in Barcelona © Yolanda Muelas for LOEWE, 2015.

The Human Factor In Artistic Jewellery

“The best objects are those made by craftsmen who have taken pleasure in creating them.” This was written over a century ago by William Morris, the Arts & Crafts ideological British designer, and adopted by Barcelona-born jeweller Ramón Puig Cuyàs (1953). The goldsmith’s brooches can be admired in Madrid, in Loewe’s 26 Serrano Street store until the end of April. The ideas that make these “timeless pieces always seem new” – to quote Jonathan Anderson, the brand’s Artistic Director – were discussed by the jeweller himself last Thursday in the legendary Madrid Gran Via store.

6The fact that an idea that is almost as old as Loewe’s first store –the location chosen by the Loewe Foundation to organise this second conversation- should still be current, summarises what the brand and the goldsmith were trying to transmit. The dialogue “The human factor in today’s creations” was, in fact, a live interview (journalist Anatxu Zabalbeascoa posed the questions) and a plea in favour of “creation with content” like the work produced by the Catalan goldsmith, who thanks to Anderson’s keen eye, was discovered by almost everyone in the audience.

Puig Cuyàs corroborated that it is only when one knows the past that one may form the necessary criteria to look to the future. The jeweller discussed the non-conformist component of jewellery, remembering that in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War it was artisans who tried new materials, not only because they lacked resources, but also to disassociate themselves from the so-called “ jewels of the black market”. As a direct consequence, and as would later also occur after World War II, a jewel was no longer about the precious metals it was made out of, but rather about artistic creation. That was how Puig identified the difference between jewels with material value, “designer” jewellery, and the few pieces that seek “to give shape to the occult” and that consequently traipse the quicksand that leads to art.

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We are the society that has amassed the largest number of objects. Also the one that feels the least attached to its possessions. As such, we have lost the memories associated with our belongings. In addition to being unsustainable, this situation shows us in a very unfavourable light. For that reason, when facing the challenge of digitalisation – and the inevitable and ongoing disappearance of the numerous objects that technology has done away with – Ramón Puig Cuyàs spoke in favour of the fundamental –and not anecdotal- importance of the ornament as imprint, memory and creation.

What Jonathan Anderson wanted to showcase, Loewe’s cultural heritage, Puig summarised as honesty, authority and truth applied to any creation. This belief in the importance of the content allowed the jeweller to defend imperfection as a personal and never ending vocabulary, as opposed to the almost mathematical language of perfection. We may draw from another Arts & Crafts artist to summarise the dialogue of opposites (chaos and order, serious and entertaining, heavy and light) captured in Puig’s latest brooches. “There is hope in honest error. None in icy perfection.” These words were coined by the architect Charles R. Mackintosh, but they could very well have been first pronounced by Puig, who closed by defending the power of his brooches as “gender-free ornaments able to broaden identities.”

Jewells that break down barriers, brooches that need the body as a frame, or as a pedestal; useful art and creation with substance. All this is can be seen in the collection of brooches that summarise the work that goldsmith and painter Ramón Puig Cuyàs has produced over the past 40 years. This was explained during the second conversation organised by the Loewe Foundation. Jewellery as art and the brooch as a vehicle that broadens one’s identity.

Ramón y Anatxu 2

Photographs: Loewe Talks, Ramón Puig Cuyàs y Anatxu Zabalbeascoa at the Loewe Store in Gran Vía, Madrid. Brooches, Ramón Puig Cuyàs. Until the end of April 2015 [Monday to Saturday: 10:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Sundays and holidays: 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.]