Archive
The new anorexia (c(r)ockery)

Nina Levett’s first design for Ritzenhoff was presented at the Ambiente Messe approximately one week ago. Levett’s new espresso cup of the Spring/Summer Collection 2012 is called “My Little Darling”.  The cup can be bought directly on the Ritzenhoff website for 19,95 EUR by clicking .

Nina Levett’s first design for Ritzenhoff was presented at the Ambiente Messe approximately one week ago. Levett’s new espresso cup of the Spring/Summer Collection 2012 is called “My Little Darling”.  The cup can be bought directly on the Ritzenhoff website for 19,95 EUR by clicking .

This collection encapsulates much of what makes Nina’s style so challenging and bold. The work was commissioned in 2009 by Illustrative an organization that showcases fresh, innovative and new design, and Cult Work.

The purpose was to celebrate the centenary of the Italian car manufacturer, Alfa Romeo.

Nina Levett had spent a month of frantic activity and considerable financial expense to interpret the design brief. In her porcelain she creates a complex swirl of action and movement in which she juxtaposes the hard, metallic, powerfully male automobile against the softer, more sexual and provocative female figures who tangle the design. She explores the car as an extension of male power that impacts forcefully on its environment. Her work fearlessly explores the negative impact of the automobile. For example, if you look at the wallpaper she created for this project, she transposed the Alfa Romeo snake logo into a human intestine, expelling faeces. In the accompanying collection of porcelain lampshades, cups and bowls, female figures and phallic cars dissolve into one another and are absorbed into the structure of the object.

Ironically, although perhaps unsurprisingly, although Nina worked with many of the unspoken, subliminal values and images that are crucial to the success of car advertising – power, masculinity, sexual dominance and sexual prowess – the explicitness and exaggeration of Nina’s interpretation might have been too bold and unsettling for Alfa Romeo. They withdrew support for the project, leaving Nina considerably out of pocket and demoralised, but artistically invigorated by the design process itself. The project crystallised in her mind the difficulty that she faces when trying to make her frequently difficult work commercial, but the experience also resulted in the birth of a new style of art. The dense, complete coverage of a surface that she created for this project was to reappear in much of the art that followed on from it and has become a hallmark of her design technique.

Nina Levett has worked a lot wedding projects. We all love weddings. In this case the couple involved is Nina’s best friend and Nina’s husband’s best friend. If this sounds like a fairy tale to you, you are right. But it really happened. The first date was set up by their friends, they fell in love and a year later they married. Unfortunately it took Nina Levett over a year to finish the wedding tableware she had promised her friends.

Photographs taken by Irene Schaur, Michal Jellinek, Alexander Grübling and Babette Kirner.
Design Assistance: Dinah Smutny.
Music by Bunny Lake.

Nina Levett creates edgy and provocative tableware and textiles. This blog is about her design process and graphics, ornaments, patterns and inspirations.
READ MORE

Follow on Bloglovin

Archive

Newsletter Sign Up



Nina Levett Design © 2013 - Wien / Vienna  |  Impressum   AGB