Milena Krais | DEFORM

On the occasion of the opening to the public, SWING Design Gallery is pleased to announce DEFORM, the first exhibition in Italy of German designer Milena Krais (Pforzheim, 1986). The exhibition project explores the world of beauty through a personal reflection that emphasizes some stereotypes of modern culture. The widespread boom of plastic surgery exorcizes human fragility, the obsession with body image and perfection, physical alterations and the fear of death. Haughty media communication pushes us to be beautiful at any cost; beautiful to be better and happier. The research of Milena Krais, greatly combining form with function, challenges the traditional aesthetic paradigms, enhancing the seductive power of plastic dissonances and revealing a sort of fascination with the uncommon. The exhibition presents ten unique works produced in 2011, some presented for the first time at the International Design Festival of Berlin (New Talents section, June 2011), others exclusively created for SWING Design Gallery. Point of departure of this reflection is a common chair, an icon of daily life, which is “deformed” by the young designer by shaping through a slow manual process the soft and sinuous surfaces, until a new physical identity is formed. “Deform seating furniture are allusions to body deformation in various ways. Like the human body itself the furniture shows lumps and swellings at second glance. In spite of these modification Deform furniture succeeds in preserving an aesthetic standard through the choice of colour and a smoothly knitted surface. Deform furniture challenges us to question the contradiction of beauty and ugliness and to break with the pressure of pursuing the perfect body.” Milena Krais