Tessa Koot‘s work straddles that most playful of boundaries, the cross-section between art and design… product and objet d’art. We first stumbled across the Dutch designer’s aesthetic meanderings at last year’s Milan Design Week, and it was at last week’s that she presented her latest collection, Tropical Dreams Vol.1, as part of some time collective Eindhoven Avant-Garde’s We Are Welcome exhibition at Ventura Lambrate.
Treading a similar path to Happy Birthday Tessa and Lisa, a collaboration with photographer Lisa Klappe that was shown at last year’s Dutch Design Week, Koot’s latest is equally entrenched in the wonder of bad taste, once-loved items now destined for car boot sales and council flats of the elderly the starting place for works that fuse kitsch with fanciful whimsy – Little Slave Girl Dreaming a standout piece, the cabinet cum sculpture recalling Mother’s Milk, the piece that led to our infatuation with the designer just a year ago.
Elsewhere, the forms of classic European design are subverted to varying levels of bewilderment, whilst the She’s a Tiger cabinet pushes limits of taste to a startling extreme. If design were cocktails, then Tessa Koot’s tropical dreams would be a piña colada fuelled by a triple helping of Jägermeister, and we’d be inebriated on wonder.
Photography © Lisa Klappe
