‘Conscious, Simple’ Design at NAGN

Fascinating furniture is on display at the National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN) from July 7 to August 7. Using very simple material, the artists, all hailing from Germany, employ very interesting concepts to create breathtaking furniture and decorations.

The art pieces range from lounge chairs, children’s chairs, wall units, coffee tables, computer tables, tripods, ashtrays to lamp posts. The design exhibition titled ‘conscious, simple’ forms part of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations aka Institut fuer Auslandbeziehungen (IfA) . Speaking at the exhibition, Professor Volker Albus of the IfA said that simplicity for some people might be ‘simple eating, like eating just those products which are growing around you or which are easy to cook in the microwave. For others simplicity is represented by a simple kind of living: no prestige objects, just some pure furniture and nothing more,’ he added. He said that the various interpretations of simplicity could be identified as the dominating common quality of contemporary young German design since the eighties and nineties. Albus said that although the artists may all have had different approaches in the construction, configuration and choice of materials, in the end all tried to design a very simple piece of furniture. ‘We want to encourage especially the young designers, design students to go their own way,’ he said, adding that the furniture were all nearly handmade and mostly from very neat materials.