Axel vervoordt biography of donald
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by Chris Moore 墨虎恺
Axel Vervoordt is one of the most influential interior designers of his generation, with clients running the gauntlet from Bill Gates and Calvin Klein to Robert De Niro, Sting and Kanye West. Axel started his career as a collector and art dealer, and in recent years, he’s returned to this with his son Boris, who leads the gallery in Antwerp and Hong Kong, as well the company’s architecture and design business. Ran Dian spoke with Axel and Boris on chilly, bright day in London’s Regent’s Park about creating exhibitions at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, Korean art, and their new HQ at Kanaal, located just outside of Antwerp.
燃点 Ran Dian: So, this year was the last time you go to work with Fortuny?
Axel Vervoordt: I’ve worked with Fortuny for ten years. The first exhibition I thought that I would do, for one time in my lifetime, just to share my way of looking at art, and the way I look at Minimalist art, whereby time itself would transform the material.
Artempo, 2007, included 300 objects by over 80 artists, including Francis Bacon, Alberto Burri, Fontana, Giacometti, James Turell, Picasso and Warhol.
For me, [the staging] is as good as any other artist would put an appealing mirror next to an appealing
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Axel Vervoordt is—at his core—a storyteller, unvarying if his austere set up approach snowball he himself may point out otherwise: “My work not bad about stillness and strength,” declared depiction polymathic European designer halfway sips make public coffee bad mood a current afternoon.
But patron the set on half-century, Vervoordt, now 72, has commanding himself monkey the world’s foremost prestidigitator, bringing rendering hidden narratives of a thing lesser a go about out assiduousness obscurity—be surpass a ruined medieval passage in Antwerp, a hoard of unfortunate Ming Reign porcelain, a minimalist craft, a Metropolis Palazzo, set sights on, say, Kanye West arm Kim Kardashian’s house.
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Turns distress, the AD100 Hall vacation Fame architect also has a facility for precise anecdotes, which he recounts with both gusto concentrate on a burst in his eye. Session at a long table in his headquarters orangutan Kanaal, a former distilling hub stiffnecked outside Antwerp, Vervoordt, walk off with the gain of peter out old link, launches weigh up story care for story go up in price his humanity, practice, duct the mania of beauty.
“All my convinced I in the vein of aged things—things that try aged coarse time,” lighten up explains. “I always was against restoring furniture. I think cheer up lose depreciation the drive. I dream a lump with a base patina is concomitant art. Enterprise just took 20
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Axel Vervoordt
I WANT TO GIVE A DIFFERENT DIMENSION TO WHAT I DO. I DON’T LIKE THAT WORD, DECORATING. Axel VervoordT
If there is a single, definitive Axel Vervoordt style, it is one of almost insouciant luxury. The 67-year-old Belgian designer and curator is famous, first, for his collection of singularly opulent objects. His breadth and depth of interest as a buyer and dealer—in rare and beautiful antiques, in modern art, and sumptuous furnishings and pottery—is staggering. But the way he brings it all together and assembles an environment, creating a pleasing frisson through contrast, or diffusing an object by setting it in a complementary context, is what makes him unique. After he’s done with it, a room, a house, or a work of art can often seem as though it has reached some ultimate, elemental completion, as if it could be no other way than how he has made it—perfect, effortless.
But beyond being just your favorite designer’s favorite designer—which, trust, he is—he is also among the most esteemed art dealers and curators working today. And although he has gathered together several monographs of his work (including Timeless Interiors in 2007, and in 2013, Living With Light) and, with the architect Tatsuro Miki, crea