La Mia Ultrafragola series: HOA DUNG CLERGET

Gazelli Art House Window Project, Winter 2018

Gazelli Art House in partnership with Central Saint Martins, the world-renowned arts and design college, is pleased to present Hoa Dung Clerget, winner of our Winter Window Project 2018 for ‘La Mia Ultrafragola series’. Our London windows will showcase La Mia Ultrafragola 1, 2 and 3 until 5th January.

In La Mia Ultrafragola series, Clerget explores the frontier between art and design, and their place in a modern society. The series, imagined to be displayed in contemporary shop-windows, refers to Walter Benjamin’s analyse of passages and shop-windows as an unprecedented Capitalism that comes together, combining commerce and aesthetic emotion, creating a world of images and market dreams. The series is also inspired by Ettore Sottsass famous mirror, Ultrafragola. Once object of daily-life, this mirror has become an object of desire, found in auction houses and sold as a piece of art. This evolution echoes to what Benjamin defined as the Modernity in his book The Arcades Projects: something that would change the face of cities. Therefore, of society. Design and fashion logics have gradually invaded the worlds of objects, moving from a functionalist conception to a seductive functionalism. With La Mia Ultrafragola series, the artist wonders about the aesthetic paradigm in a capitalist world entered into the stage hyper-modernity dominated by ambivalence. Can Art escape this condition?