Momentum by Fredrikson Stallard: Fairytales for Grown-ups

For Fredrikson Stallard, foundation of design lies in flux of craft, industrial, contextual, sculptural and avant-garde. The new Momentum collection, launched at London Design Festival with David Gill Gallery, continues the British designer duo’s tradition of avant-garde design.

Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard have curated a theatrical set at their headquarters in Holborn, London. The designers started in New York a decade ago with a collection Gloves for an Armless Venus, which presented a recognizable signature that has since been acknowledged by interior designers, architects, luxury brands and galleries worldwide. The collaboration with David Gill gallery in London has facilitated their development and allowed them to grow in terms of imagination and poetry.

For the first time since the inaugural collection, Fredrikson Stallard focuses solely on their own visions and ideology. With Momentum, the designers state the end of validity of form and function as guidelines for designers working in a world overflowing with objects, and present their work as fairytales for grown-ups, as pieces that combine simple narratives to underlying themes of opulent and sensual darkness.

“They are things we want to create purely because we think they should exist – no purpose beyond just being. The collection as a whole has the air of being dreamed up, not calculated,” the designers reveal in an essay What You Wish For, written by Glenn Adamson and Nanette L. Laitman, Director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, for a limited-edition Momentum artist book.

Spanning across furniture, sculpture, products and print, the experimental collection is comprised of one-off and limited edition works, but also of transitory pieces only meant to last the duration of the event. Momentum stresses the importance of conceptual and creative development and celebrates the ten years of Fredrikson Stallard.

“The bronze small-scale sculptures are processed from off-cuts and leftovers of the larger pieces. We carve them by hand and then produce the cast pieces to reveal their preciousness,” Ian Stallard says.

In the Meteorite chandelier and the Parachute table, the designers play with crushed aluminium foil, which is framed with glass and coated polycarbonate for the low unique table. The Species sofas, made of polyurethane, glass fibre and polyester, invite to a poetic travel in time. The velvety flocking surface as well as solidity and density of the sofas create tension with free-flowing lines, transparency and lightness of the Tokyo table.

Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard first began working together in 1995, and work with leading names in contemporary design. Their work has been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the French National Museum, and shown at exhibitions at the Design Museum in London, MoMA and the Museum of Art and Design in New York. The designers have also received several prestigious design awards, including the Red Dot Design Awards.