On the occasion of the Furniture Fair of Milan and for the first time in Italy and galleria francesca kaufmann is presenting Lily van der Stokker‘s “furniture project”.

Lily van der Stokker was born in Hertogenbosch in 1954 and she lives and works between Amsterdam and New York. 

The Furniture Project, a group of tables and chairs designed by Leo Krol and printed with six different patterns by Lily van der Stokker, undoubtedly reflects the irreverence which has always characterized the artist. They are in fact design objects at odds with design and art pieces at odds with art per se.

Lily van der Stokker has always been faithful to wall painting, a genre which with its fleeting and provisory formal status tends to be disturbing to the viewer. The artist has chosen this medium to reveal her constant tendency towards the poetics of the politically incorrect, questioning the very nature of an art piece and the concepts by which it is thus reputed.

From her early wall paintings which recall children’s drawings Lily van der Stokker has privileged an art which would “strike the heart rather than the mind” to arrive at to the creation of grand pieces such as the “Pink Building” in Hanover, a building completely covered by a floral pattern and commissioned by Kasper Konig for the Expo 2000.

Unsuspectedly, Lily van der Stokker has stretched her will to extend her artistic concepts to the whole of everyday life. Significant to this shift was the show she conceived for galleria francesca kaufmann in 2002. On this occasion the artist covered all the walls of the entire gallery, thus trespassing common space.

Simultaneously, the artist has directed her research towards works which could enter in communication with surrounding architecture, spaces and the audience. The sofas, the chairs and the boxes which have become part of her recent wall paintings invite the spectator to sit and relax and so be seduced by an exuberant art which displays playfulness and irony and is rendered unique by its unmistakable decorative touch. It is in the determination to attract the public which one might retrace the premise that has led to the “Furniture Project” a group of furniture pieces which maintains the infantile-decorative characteristics of the work and at the same time explores new perspectives. 

The show presents a new arrangement mode which develops a new dialogue with space and an original alternative to the known concept of furniture, usually merely considered a synthesis of form and décor. Overtly simple tables and chairs are overwhelmed by a voluntary childish decoration which recall a kindergarten and open doors upon a subversive world made of exuberance, harmony and color.