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The new line of furniture by designer Vladimir Krasnogorov presented by Thomas Newman Studio is a significant departure from contemporary trends, dominated since the 1950s by the so called "Mid-century Modern" style.
Its motifs are notably "organic," yet with a sculptural sophistication that recounts the renown architect Zaha Hadid. One might call it "Nouvel Art Nouveau" with its emphasis on hand carved wood. But the carving is an abstract organic, with no attempt at accurate depiction of any particular reference.
The ethos of Midcentury Modern design derives from the Russian Avant Garde, passed on most notably by the Bauhaus school in Germany in the 1920s. Bolshevik revolutionaries, wanting to exorcise all references to the decadent, corrupt Tsarist regime, moved to a radically abstracted art - a "purified" redux of elementary shapes, lines, and colors, no longer associated with the state, or formal religious institutions. The Bauhaus school moved these ideas into furniture design. It disdained traditional crafts in favor of simplified, mass-produced furniture for the common person.
No doubt many great designs emerged from this movement. However, for Krasnogorov, there is much that has been lost. His use of organic motifs refocuses on the natural world and celebrates its beauty, balance and evocative power. At the same time, the "hand of man," in the form of craft and artisanship, is celebrated as a participant with nature -- an antidote, perhaps, to our present troubled relationship with the planet, and a contrast to factory furniture where both the natural beauty of wood, and the beauty of human creativity, have been compromised by the exigencies of mass production and the economies of scale.