Fredrikson Stallard is a London based art, design and interiors practice founded in 2005 by Patrik Fredrikson (Swedish, born 1968) and Ian Stallard (British, born 1973). Breaking onto the scene with their iconic furniture and sculptural works, they have become synonymous with contemporary British art and design.
Their award-winning work is recognised for its ability to create emotionally engaging artworks, sculptural furniture and interior design. Bridging the gap between fine art and design, their work can be found at numerous museums and galleries worldwide. Fredrikson Stallards works have been acquired for the permanent collections of museums including MOMA San Francisco, the French National Art Collection, twice by the Victoria & Albert Museum, shown at MOMA New York, the Museum of Art and Design New York, Design Museum Holon, Design Museum London, The Belvedere Museum Vienna, Museum Angewandte Frankfurt, Musée d’Art Moderne Luxembourg, The Museum of London.
Fredrikson Stallard has exhibited widely with both solo and group exhibitions across the world.
Their cutting edge, conceptually rigorous work has been regularly discussed and praised in the design and art press and is sought after by international collectors and galleries. Their extensive monograph “Works” was published by Skira in 2019.
Fredrikson Stallard has been the recipient and nominee of some of the most prestigious art and design awards, including the Red Dot Design Award, The Arts Foundation Furniture Fellowship, a competition held only every 10 years, Designer of the year from The Design Museum, Wallpaper magazine Design of the Year, British Design of the Year from Elle Decoration.
Their work has been voted in the top ten designs of the last decade by The Financial Times and is included in the top 3 most collectible designs by HSBC Private Bank.
Their private clients include some of the most important international art collectors as well as VIP’s from the world of entertainment and royalty.
Their corporate clients include leading names in contemporary art, design and fashion including Aston Martin, Jaguar, The Kering Group, Richemont, LVMH, Royal Caribbean, Cartier, Swarovski, Brioni, Chanel, Dior, Gieves & Hawkes, Fabergé, Veuve Clicquot, Wallpaper*, Comme des Garçons, Driade, The British Independent Film Awards, Dunhill, The London Design Festival, Harrods, The Mandarin Oriental Hotel, The Savoy Hotel, Soho & Tribeca Grand.
“We create works which thrive on a raw sense of energy, chaos, destruction and recreation, to allow us to experience the world in new ways, and to see it differently. We move towards the post-apocalyptic, the chimerical, that visually embodies our thoughts. We give a dream of something different, something extra-ordinary, something genuine, authentic, human – a new reality.
Often it is through interaction with the works themselves, in real time, in the real world, that they achieve their authentic presence. Exploiting the most subtle aspects of texture, material, volume, light, movement and contrast, the works function on a four-dimensional graph, between the twin axes of time and space, they thirst for human interaction – it completes them. Because our work is often able to interact with the viewer through functionality it gives a new avenue of appreciation and pleasure, no longer just visual and aesthetic, it is now tactile, sensual, interactive and physical. The viewer now becomes an expanded interactive entity, an active participant in the creation of the final work; in effect, the audience is now the activator of the latent performative aspect of the work.
Function and technology are the two cornerstones of modernism; we reject neither, but what we strongly reject is the idea that function and technology are somehow more important than emotion – the obsession of the post-industrial age with the notion that thought is more important than feeling, ego more important than id. In our practice over the last twenty years, a hammer has been of equal importance to 3D computer software in the genesis and production of the work. Being able to sit on one of our sofas has been of equal concern to that of its aesthetic and sculptural qualities as an object in its own right. We are in tune with the thoughts of Franz West on function: ‘My aphorism is not that form follows function but that it never violates it,’ and his sense that his work was ‘too strange to be “good design” and too functional to be “good art” though they are ultimately both’.
Our focus is in the performance of creation, to capture and record instinctive, instantaneous moments, the tactical disruption of structure, and the careful choreography of its aftermath. It is the creation of a subconscious collage. Technology is deployed to reveal new dimensions within these gestural beginnings, shifting our perception through a nuanced appreciation and manipulation of scale, materiality and functional attributes. In this way we reunite thought and feeling, ego and id, subconscious irrationality and reason. The audience is given the power to perceive their own ideas in the abstractions they are presented with, as with Rorschach ink blots with which we worked extensively in our formative years. The works have an extreme precision of task within their bodies which at first glance may have appeared haphazard or inconclusive. They are in fact neither. In their baroque simplicity they are truly inclusive, collaborative. They are yours. They are what you want, desire and need.
The work must allow the freedom and expression of the manner of creation and the functionality or otherwise of the piece to be born from the core values of desire, instinct and feeling, honesty, authenticity and truth.
As Lucio Fontana stated: ‘An art based on forms created by the subconscious and balanced by reason, constitutes a true expression of existence and is the synthesis of a moment in time.’”