Press Breakfast, 20 August

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

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

Breakfast and refreshments served.

RADICAL ROOMS has never been shown in Sweden before. The exhibition places the functional sculpture of Gufram and Memphis Milano in the same room as contemporary painting by Niall Campbell Strachan and Lovisa Sköld. Design that has always been art, beside art that takes over the room.

Gufram was founded in Turin in 1966. Its material was flexible polyurethane foam, originally developed to insulate buses and railway carriages. The company handed the material to artists and architects without specifying an outcome. From this came works such as the Bocca sofa of 1970, a seat in the form of an enormous pair of red lips, and Pratone of 1971, an enlarged square of meadow that you do not so much sit on as fall into. By 1972 the works had reached the Museum of Modern Art in New York through the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz, where they were classified under the heading "contestatory design".

Memphis began at a dinner in Ettore Sottsass's apartment in Milan on 11 December 1980 and took its name from a Bob Dylan record playing on repeat. The first exhibition opened on Via Manzoni in September 1981. The group took plastic laminate, until then used only in kitchens, and applied it to furniture for reception rooms. They were accused of superficiality. The superficiality was the method.

Both design houses are today owned by Italian Radical Design.

Alongside them, work by two painters is shown. Lovisa Sköld renders latex, lacquer and polyester in oil painting 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, makes indescribable creatures on cardboard and recycled aluminium using spray paint and heavy layers of acrylic.

Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar of The Art Bystander is the curator of the exhibition. Liin and Jonatan Erlandsson and the team from Mankovsky Gallery will be present during the presentation and breakfast.

Attending press will have the chance to see the exhibition in an empty gallery. Interviews are offered on request. Press images, the full exhibition text and artist biographies will follow at a later date.

Breakfast and refreshments will be served. Places are limited. Please confirm your attendance by 18 August.

RADICAL ROOMS opens to the public on Saturday 22 August.

RADICAL ROOMS – Press Breakfast

An exclusive press breakfast with a preview of RADICAL ROOMS at Mankovsky Gallery, 20 August 2026.