Zaha Hadid - Design London Wednesday, April 29, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Established & Sons, Ltd, London

  • Literature

    Seamless Zaha Hadid, exh. cat., Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, 2006, n.p.

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Turning and turning in the widening gyre…”, wrote W.B. Yeats in The Second Coming, his dirge of 1919. By then the vortex of war had drawn the world into its current. Each day opened new degrees of tumult (the Irish Revolution erupted in January of that year). Zaha Hadid, by building and naming the present lot, offers her own remark on present turmoil, although not as overtly as Yeats. If we agree with Aristotle—politics constitutes the structure and organisation of the state—then architecture becomes a political act. Design too is implicated, for it likewise builds on the human need for structure and support, albeit on a smaller scale.
     
    In late November 2006, immediately following her retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Zaha Hadid exhibited ‘Seamless’ at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York. The collection, produced by Established & Sons, included five limited edition lacquered polyester resin works: ‘Nekton’ stools, ‘Crest’ shelf, ‘Serif’ shelves, ‘Swash’ cabinet, and ‘Gyre’ chair, the present lot. The series continued Hadid’s preoccupation with allegories of motion and of naturally occurring phenomena, in this case water, flow, and aquatic organisms.
     
    A gyre is a system of ocean currents generated by wind, temperature, the Earth’s rotation, and the gravitation of the moon—no mean flux. Hadid reminds us of our own small seat: we are compassed by forces greater than ourselves. On the occasion of her 2004 Pritzker Prize, juror Ada Louis Huxtable wrote, “[Her] fragmented geometry and fluid mobility do more than create an abstract, dynamic beauty; this is a body of work that explores and expresses the world we live in. The chair’s violent protrusions disrupt space. In apposition—we all daily live with instability—the chair’s curves are an expression of fluidity and seamless complexity, a universal condition. Beyond agitated lines, the tension in Hadid’s work arises from the difficulty inherent in her undertaking: to represent motion by arresting it." Despite the contradiction her message is clear: we can never sit still.

83

‘Gyre’ lounge chair

2006
Custom-coloured lacquered polyester resin. 
64.5 cm. (25 3/8 in.) high
Produced by Established & Sons, Ltd, UK, from the Seamless Collection.  Number four from an edition of 12.  Underside with two brass roundels impressed with ‘Designed by/Zaha Hadid/Seamless/2006/Gyre 4 / 12’ and ‘Established/& Sons/British Made’.

Estimate
£40,000 - 50,000 

Design

30 Apr 2009, 2pm
London