korban/flaubert: Growth Patterns

February 15, 2007 – March 31, 2007

Opening Reception for the Artists: Thursday February 15, 2007 7 – 10 pm.

Recently featured on the cover of Surface Magazine, korban/flaubert is a design and production partnership between Janos Korban (b.1961), a metalwork specialist with a background in psychology and genetics, and architect Stefanie Flaubert (b.1965). Established in Stuttgart Germany in the first half of the 1990s korban/flaubert relocated to Sydney, Australia in 1995 to set up a workshop to explore ideas for form and furniture. Focusing on collaborative investigations into materials, structure and spatial relationships, they produce a range of eclectic furniture and lighting, as well as more ambiguous forms and large site specific space/sculpture commissions for commercial and private clients.

This is their first solo exhibition in the US.

design vision
"We use our workshop as a testing laboratory to generate forms and evolve technical resolution. we try to generate something real/fundamental by understanding basic effects of material, volume and action. at the same time we invest significant resources in technical and production research to ensure the large scale viability of our products."
They describe their organic approach to design as a ‘process of discovery’. The function is not predetermined. Through experimenting with materials, volume and action an end product might emerge as a seat, a light or some sculptural fantasy. The application is found in the form itself, ‘the idea falls out of life, the form falls out of the idea'.

"Our pieces, like life in Australia, are equally at home inside or outside. we take our inspiration from the natural world at all its scales: from micro to macro."

materials/manufacturing processes

k/f investigate material + action! k/f aim to produce pure self-evident functional forms which explore fundamental effects and responses using pure materials. we continue to explore the potential for interaction with objects through reconfigurability, surprise and transformation.

Repetition/rhythm/complexity/reconfigurability are for us the important elements that prompt this adventure of perception. This kind of thinking is also at the root of the design