RADICAL ROOMS

Mankovsky Gallery and The Art Bystander invite you to a press breakfast.

Thursday 20 August
08.30 to 09.30
Mankovsky Gallery
Linnégatan 13, Stockholm

Breakfast and refreshments served.

RSVP by 18 August

RADICAL ROOMS has not been assembled in Sweden before. It places the functional sculpture of Gufram and the Memphis Group in the same room as contemporary painting by Niall Campbell Strachan and Lovisa Sköld. Design that was always art, beside art that takes over the room.

Gufram was founded in Turin in 1966. Its material was flexible polyurethane foam, developed to insulate buses and railway carriages, which the company handed to artists and architects without specifying an outcome. The results included the Bocca sofa of 1970, a seat in the form of an enormous pair of red lips, and the Pratone of 1971, a magnified square of meadow into which one does not sit so much as fall. By 1972, the work had reached the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in Emilio Ambasz's Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, where it was classified under the heading of contestatory design.

Memphis began at a dinner in Ettore Sottsass's Milan apartment on 11 December 1980, taking its name from a Bob Dylan record left on repeat. The first exhibition opened on Via Manzoni in September 1981. The group took plastic laminate, until then permitted only in the kitchen, and applied it to the furniture of the reception room. It was accused of frivolity. Frivolity was the method.

Both houses are today owned by Italian Radical Design.

Alongside them, two painters. Lovisa Sköld renders latex, patent and polyester in oil, and painted the official poster for this year's Göteborg Film Festival under the theme Focus: Truth. Niall Campbell Strachan, born in Scotland in 1986, builds unnameable creatures on cardboard and salvaged aluminium in spray paint and heavy acrylic.

Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar of The Art Bystander hosts as curator, with Liin and Jonatan Erlandsson and the team from Mankovsky Gallery present during the presentation and breakfast.

Press attending will see the exhibition in an empty gallery before it opens to the public. Interviews available on request. Press images, the full exhibition text and artist biographies will follow in due course.

Places are limited. Please confirm by 18 August.

RADICAL ROOMS opens to the public on Saturday 22 August.