R & Company Presents Porky Hefer

After making waves representing South Africa at last September’s London Design Biennale, Porky Hefer takes stage at New York’s R & Company gallery this month. Mounted with Cape Town design authority Southern Guild, the Heart of Lightness solo show reveals a group of never-seen-before works. Challenging heady conceptions of high art and design, the new series of hanging sofas, nests or cocoons reignites our primal sense of intuition and play.

Though highly influenced by the bombastic, iconographically-remixed approach of radicals working in the late 1960s, Hefer makes a strong claim for the value of the handmade, sensual and visceral. Much like his predecessors Joe Colombo and Wendell Castle, the South African designer explores how one can find temporal isolation and comfort in the uncertainty of re-defined, multifunctional space. One can only think of the cabriolet bed in Colombo’s RotoLiving interior.

Much of Hefer’s latest work achieves the same. Playing with the notions of concealment and camouflage, works like BWA Leaf Mask or Wasp Nest emulate ideas of disguise and shelter respectively. Inside Caterpiller, one is intoxicated with odours of hide and sheepskin – natural materials indicative of the designer’s homeland. Hefer reveals an Africa enthralled in the promotion of bespoke crafts and a closer connection to nature rather than the homogeny of mass production. These works, what Radical Italian forefather Andrea Branzi might deem the fruition of his Animali Domestici doctrine, provide experiences that re-engage our basic instincts.

Heart of Lightness by Porky Hefer: till 23 February
R & Company: 82 Frankin St. New York