Friedman Benda announces its fifth annual guest-curated exhibition entitled Blow Up. Curated by Felix Burrichter, the founder and editor of the architecture and design magazine PIN–UP, the exhibition will take the miniaturized domestic ideal of the dollhouse and blow it back up to full size. With the help of design firm CHARLAP HYMAN & HERRERO, Burrichter will transform the gallery space into a Freudian trip through a 1:1 dollhouse, complete with bedroom, dining room, kitchen, study, and nursery.

 

Throughout the exhibition, the art and design will bear the strangeness of their “re-rescaling” as simplified forms designed for a miniature world entering back into our own. Shrunken furniture will be restored to macro scale in a double abstraction that leaves everything at uncanny and uneven. “Blow Up is a show about the aesthetics and materiality of scale, and how the objects we’re surrounded with during our childhood condition our ideas of domesticity, taste, and social norms today,” states Burrichter.

 

Blow Up is a dialogue between seminal designs from 1970s and 80s by Wendell Castle, Gaetano Pesce, and Shiro Kuramata, with contemporary art and design, including over a dozen works specially commissioned for the show. Artists, architects, and designers on view include:

​

​

BUTTERNUTTEN (BNAG)

ESTUDIO CAMPANA

RAFAEL DE CÁRDENAS/ARCHITECTURE AT LARGE

WENDELL CASTLE

LUCA CIPELLETTI

TELFAR CLEMENS

CAMILLE HENROT

CHARLAP HYMAN & HERRERO

MISHA KAHN

DOZIE KANU

SHIRO KURAMATA

WOLFGANG LAUBERSHEIMER (PENTAGON GROUP)

PETER MARIGOLD

ODD MATTER

SARAH ORTMEYER

WOODY DE OTHELLO

GAETANO PESCE

RADE PETRASEVIC

LARRY RANDOLPH

LEON RANSMEIER

SOFT BAROQUE

OONA BRANGAM SNELL

SAM STEWART

KATIE STOUT

JONATHAN TRAYTE

CHEN CHEN & KAI WILLIAMS

KRISTEN WENTRCEK & ANDREW ZEBULON