'The Tightrope Walker' at Timothy Taylor Gallery

July 11, 2010 - Source: Timothy Taylor Gallery
This exhibition represents a very rare meeting of art and design in a gallery context. It will explore how artists and designers sought simplicity and honesty amidst a growing appreciation of the ordinary and the everyday during this key transitional period in European history.

From 1945, artists and designers needed a way to renew art and culture having emerged into a blasted and impoverished landscape, haunted by horrific imagery of death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. Post-occupation Paris was Europe's primary artistic and intellectual hub, packed with a rich mix of artists, designers, philosophers and poets. Artists and designers wanted to work both with and beyond the scarring effects of the recent past - they valued utility and practicality and celebrated the mundane and the everyday. Developing new forms of realism, they created interior and private worlds, and found inspiration in uncontaminated natural and primitive forms.