The ethos of Creazioni is eclectic Italian furniture with a big twist. It’s Vintage philosophy, fine finishings and contemporary fabrics blend into a timeless style, creating a versatile product that perfectly fits different living spaces, capturing the mood of a place. Their eclectic collections include seventies style lamps, soft sofas with lion’s claw feet, sideboards and chests with metallic finishes and ethnic objects immersed in intriguing thirties atmospheres. What makes it all work is Creazioni’s ability to combine unusual shapes, crisp colour contrasts and unusual combinations of different materials. High quality craftsmanship from Italy and something that cannot always be taken for granted in every interior these days: a touch of simple good taste.

A company based in Cantù Italia the so called “City of Furniture” is now in UAE, Creazioni by Silik.

The passion to dress up the past styles with a big twist to make it modern and carefree look results the birth of the Creazioni brand in 1997.

Expert Cristina Gattei with her team sets their goal to make Creazioni brand to be known for reviving past classic styles with a unique modern fusion. The designers masterfully “dress up “ the styles in a surprising form, lively colors, interesting materials and finishes, creating a dazzling, ironic, remarkable, unique furniture in a new level of elegance without loosing its classic remarks. No wonder Creazioni caught the attention of the international market in a short span of time.

Creazioni considered today an Art of Decoration with the philosophy of their vintage finishing by using contemporary timeless styles. They bring furniture into a new level of art and creativity.  Their extraordinary collection is like living a fantasy where imagination is the limit. A pouf with an eccentric bird foot, a table with a Romanesque sculpture plinths, a pony rocking chair in a shape of a horse, a mirror with an extravagant crown, a mushroom-like table and many other classic furniture combined with a unique shape, contrasting colors and bold combination truly makes them exceptional and artistically clever.

Always governed by the high quality craftsmanship and something that cannot always be taken for granted in every interior these days: a touch of simple good taste. Their design is based on the latest technologies on furniture production and past achievements of the iconic masters. They’re using an array of wood and metals as main materials for their furniture, unusual and contrasting colors, typically with glossy or matt lacquered finish, and commonly using hand painted or with embroidery thread and cloth upholstery (customers can also use their customize their designs).

Investing and collecting Creazioni furniture is something not to be afraid of, for it  will never be out of style as a work of art is timeless. Visit House of Folly for the full collection of Creazioni, where fantasy creates home.

See some of the product range at our website.

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Takashi Murakami is a Japanese artist combining the fine and the commercial art worlds. Often categorized alongside artists working within the tradition of Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, and Jeff Koons, Murakami’s work has achieved a widespread level of fame beyond the art world. His innovative “Superflat” aesthetic—combining classical Japanese art with contemporary Japanese pop culture—has made him one of the most innovative artists working today. He continues to explore the links between traditional printmaking and Japanese styles of comics in post-war society in his highly graphic, vibrantly colored works. Despite its outward playfulness, Murakami’s art acts as a cultural critique with subversive undertones hidden in its imagery. Born on February 1, 1962 in Tokyo, Japan, where he currently lives and works, Murakami has embraced commerce through the founding Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., an artist management agency and studio. With his popular collaboration with the fashion label Louis Vuitton, Murakami has established himself as a pioneer of promoting art as a brand. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions around the world, include those held at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Gagosian Gallery in London, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the Versailles Palace.

From shop floors to boutique hotels, homes, workspaces and more, DESKi, ZIGGi and CLASSi have been created with a vision to transform and harmonise any space; while adding an artistic element, memorable design and magical ambience to the room. Each flat LED “by BULBING” lamp is made from a thick and strong sheet of acrylic glass that has been accurately laser engraved to create a classic lampshade silhouette. By etching dozens of intricate lines onto the acrylic sheet, we are able to create a sense of dimensionality, as LED light travels through the lines illuminating the design and creating a powerful optical illusion. Full range available to purchase at www.houseoffolly.com.

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As the pioneer in developing an architectural style that strove for an “organic architecture” in building design, Frank Lloyd Wright remains a profoundly influential American architect who developed a distinctly unique style. He designed numerous iconic buildings, including the building Fallingwater which has been called “the best all-time work of American Architecture.” He was a leader of the Prairie School movement and his creative period spanned more than seventy years. Already well known during his life, he was recognized as “the greatest American architect of all time” by the American Institute of Architects in 1991, and he remains an influential figure to this day.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT BIOGRAPHY
Frank Lloyd Wright was born June 8th, 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin. His father was an orator, music teacher and itinerant minister. His mother was the member of a large family of Unitarians, and both his parents were strong-willed and passed their interests and beliefs down onto the young Frank. In 1870, the family moved to Weymouth for Frank’s father to minister a small congregation.

In 1876, his mother visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and saw an exhibit of educational blocks created by Friedrich Fröbel, which was an integral part of his kindergarten curriculum. Frank’s mother became excited by the possibilities and bought a set of blocks, allowing the young Wright to play with them as much as he’d like. These geometrically shaped, three-dimensional blocks allowed the user to assemble them in different configurations to form compositions and Wright described the influences that these blocks had on him in his autobiography:

“For several years I sat at the little Kindergarten table-top … and played … with the cube, the sphere and the triangle—these smooth wooden maple blocks … All are in my fingers to this day…”

When Frank Lloyd Wright turned 14, his parents split up, and he took on the mantle of financial responsibility for the family.

He completed high school and joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a special student in 1886. There he joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and took part-time classes for two semesters while working with a professor of civil engineering, Allan Conover. While leaving the school without taking a degree, he found employment in Chicago after the great fires raged through the city, and found himself in the midst of a plethora of development work.

He joined the firm Adler &Sullivan in 1888 where he remained for some time, developing his skills and building concepts and also progressed to his desire to search for new and appropriate styles of Midwestern architecture. This lead to the coining of the movement “Prairie School” of architecture and by 1900, the movement was mature, with Frank Lloyd Wright, almost entirely self-taught, being its chief practitioner. The school used a radical approach to building homes, utilizing mass-produced materials and equipment, and discarded elaborate compartmentalization of rooms in favor of bold, plain walls and roomy family areas. The designs emphasized comfort, convenience and spaciousness all within affordable metrics.

Frank Lloyd Wright would repeatedly lecture during this time, and his most famous talk, The Art and Craft of the Machine was first printed in 1901. By this time, Wright’s practice dealt with everything from apartment houses to group dwellings and recreation centers.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
In the late 1920s and into the 30’s, Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic style had fully matured, and can be evidenced by the works Graycliff, Fallingwater and Taliesin West.

The Graycliff estate is located near downtown Buffalo and is sometimes called, “Jewel on the Lake.” It stands as one of the most ambitious and extensive summer estates that Wright ever designed and is a complex of three buildings inside an 8.5-acre landscape. It is notable for its largest building, which incorporates a two stone veneer covered sections that frame a central pavilion-like center of transparent glass walls, allowing visitors to see through the building itself, to the lake beyond.

Fallingwater was a house designed as a weekend home for Edgar Kaufmann and is located in southwestern Pennsylvania. It is considered Wright’s most famous work, and has won numerous awards. The way it elegantly integrates itself into the landscape, almost becoming a part of the waterfall itself, is a marvel to behold, and the cantilevered engineering is a brilliant addition to home that is clearly too large for the small plot of land it was originally intended for. By stretching the house over the water, the size requirements of the buyer could be met.

FUN FACTS
Frank Lloyd Wright was “one of the original hippies, a touchstone figure who brought us out from behind the walls of closed-in rooms and back into the embrace of nature,” wrote T.C. Boyle of Wright’s love for the natural.
His buildings were notorious for maintenance difficulties, and many had, for example, leaking roofs and too-narrow doorframes that did not allow furniture to pass through. Wright remained indifferent to such complaints, deeming them inevitable in the sight of serious experimentation.
He developed concepts for the single-family home for the average citizen, and would devise ways to let families get good design on a budget.
A lover of poetry, specifically the poetry of Whitman and Emerson, Wright himself considered his buildings poetic and would obsess over incorporating his buildings harmoniously and artistically into the surroundings.
He was not a fan of New York City, or any other city because he felt they were much too cramped and crowded, lacking in cultural and social enrichment. Mostly, however, he believed them to be badly designed.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Frank Lloyd Wright received a great deal of recognition in his lifetime, and many honors for his achievements. He received Gold Medal awards from The Royal Institute of British Architects in 1941 and the American Institute of Architects in 1949. His contributions to the 20th and 21st-century architectural movements are massive, and his influence will resound for decades to come.

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The contemporary sculptor Ottmar Hörl has had a delightful effect on the state of contemporary art and sculpture as a whole. His playful style mixes with his social commentary to form a public service that gratifies as well as educates. A master sculptor, he is most famous for his works that cover public places and squares and implicitly demand public attention, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Everything from everyday dogs and ravens to the more fantastical depictions of gnomes and the heavy seriousness of Martin Luther and Charlemagne are directly in his purview and his ability to instigate conversation is remarkable.

OTTMAR HÖRL BIOGRAPHY
Ottmar Hörl was born in 1950 in the town of Nauheim, Germany. He enjoyed an everyday childhood and upbringing similar to most other Germans of the time, and he enrolled for studies at the Academy of Fine Arts at Frankfurt in 1975, where he remained and graduated in 1979. In 1978, he received a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (the German National Academic Foundation), which he used for three years while he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, where he graduated in 1981.

In 1985, he founded the group Fomalhaut, which is the design, architectural and art studio comprised of himself, and the architects Gabriela Seifert and Goetz Stoeckmann, who then went on to design impressive pieces such as Living Room – a contemporary residence made of aluminum panels in the medieval center of Gelnhause, Germany.

Hörl was granted a visiting professorship in 1992, at the Graz University of Technology, Austria (in company with Fomalhaut), and earned several awards during this time, the Förderpreis für Baukunst (Grant for Architecture) awarded by the Academy of Arts, Berlin in 1994, the art multiple Award awarded at the International Art Fair (Internationaler Kunstmarkt), Düsseldorf in 1997, and the Wilhelm Loth Award awarded by the City of Darmstadt in 1998.

Ottmar Hörl became professor of fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der Bildenden Künste), Nuremberg in 1999, and rose to become the President of the Academy in 2005, where he remains holding this position to this day.

He has most recently won the CREO Innovation Award for Creativity, Frankfurt a. M./Mainz, German Society for Creativity in 2015.

OTTMAR HÖRL CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
Hörl’s career has had an interesting trajectory and is almost unique in its desire to engage the public, rather than the private, consciousness. His works all embody his maxim of “sculpture as an organizational principle,” with prominent examples of this being his Charlemagne (2014) or Martin Luther – Here I stand (2010) installations. Hörl’s aim is to remove the ‘elitist’ elements of art by encouraging public discourse and interaction as well as utilizing mass reproduction. This allows him to create occasions for communication instead of traditional, imposing monuments. As Dr. Carsten D. Siebert explains, “His art has an immediate presence; it becomes an event and an experience that inspires and brings together people from all over the world.”

A prominent, mischievous installation called Flying Change, staged in Selignstadt in 1994, involved the creation and placement of 1000 blue garden gnomes throughout the urban area of the city. The gnomes are themselves quite humorous and depict a fully blue gnome fingering the viewer with a large smile on his face. The intended effect of this installation was for the public to move them around and even take them for themselves, causing a displacement from one spot to the next – creating a Flying Change. Since Hörl decreed that the project belonged to the public, he believed that the change of ownership was nonexistent, since it was a communal gift and not a personal offering.

This delightful lack of permanence and ownership is echoed in a saying from the artist himself:

“This is what interests me as an artist – that my own formulations will raise my own next question. This question that follows becomes possible because I do not offer any permanent solution – because no such solution exists.”

In 2014, Hörl continued this theme of impermanence with his installation of 500 figures of Charlemagne in Aachen. His intent with this installation, not only being a visual feast seeing hundreds of fully-red Charlemagne figures with gold ones interspersed, must be viewed as a refocusing of our images of the great ruler. By dropping the ‘huge’ and ‘mythical’ figure of the emperor to a one-meter tall statue, Hörl already subverts our expectations for reverence and respect. Hörl invites this comparison and asks us to rethink our perspectives and perceptions of, not only Charlemagne but of the upper echelons of society in general. We all have different perspectives of everyone in our lives, not only the huge, leadership figures, and each one of these perspectives informs upon the nature of the entire person. The Father of Europe, the womanizer, the butcher of Saxons, the missionary, the visionary, the promoter of culture – all these and more are simply facets of the whole of Charlemagne.

Ottmar Hörl continues to this day, creating sculptures for public viewing and consumption as well as for furthering his ideology and philosophical aims.
FUN FACTS
He works in a variety of synthetic mediums, including metals and plastics.
He has created large public works, and also personal commissions.
He has been included in dozens of public collections, from Amsterdam to the US.
He draws inspiration from Durer, as well as other famous sculptors.
He also dabbles in media other than sculpture – video installations being notable.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: We are happy to feature a contemporary artist as notable and as well established as Ottmar Hörl, who remains an impressive and jovial sculptor on the world stage. His free spirit, his desire to spread his message and art to everyone in society and not just high-society elite, and his mischievous nature are all values we love to see in any artist. From his diminutive gnomes to his treatment of prominent historical figures, Hörl will have a relevant message for years to come, and we will be proud to follow him every step of the way.

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WHO WAS CHARLES AND RAY EAMES?

Charles and Ray Eames, the mid-20th century geniuses who developed and contributed greatly to the movements of modern architecture and furniture design, are extremely influential in their spheres and well known for their work such as the Eames Lounge Chair. They dedicated a career to modern design, but also to practicality, simplicity, and aesthetics, which is easily visible in their most famous constructions. Not only did they create and contribute to their most important fields (architecture and design), they also dealt extensively in fine art and film, and industrial and graphic design. Charles and Ray Eames took the idea of modernity and shaped it into a beautiful personal vision which remains to this day.

CHARLES AND RAY EAMES BIOGRAPHY
Charles Ormond Eames, Jr was born on June 17, 1907, in St. Louis, Missouri, and was the younger of two children. He developed an interest in architecture in high school and then went on to work at the Laclede sSteel company, where he learned more about the fields of engineering, architecture, and drawing. He received an architecture scholarship and attended Washington University at St. Louis after graduating high school, but left after two years of instruction.By 1930, he had established his own architectural firm in St. Louis with his partner Charles Gray and was then later joined by an additional member named Walter Pauley. He soon after received a fellowship to Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he eventually rose to the head of the design department.

Ray Eames was born Bernice Alexandra Kaiser in Sacramento, California in 1912. She moved to New York in 1929 and graduated from the Bennet Women’s College in Millbrook, New York in 1933, where she studied abstract expressionist painting. From this time, one of her paintings resides permanently in the Whitney Museum of American Art.
She eventually enrolled at the Cranbrook Academy in 1940 upon recommendations from a friend, where she met Charles Eames and the two quickly began collaborations. They married in 1941 and established a lifelong partnership – both romantically and artistically.

Charles and Ray Eames then moved to Los Angeles and opened up their own design studio, and eventually received work from the Navy wartime effort, where they enjoyed the opportunity to experiment with new methods of bending and forming plywood. Everything from plywood airplane parts to molded leg splints was being designed by the two and contributed significantly to the war effort.

After decades of successful collaboration and creation, Charles Eames died of a heart attack on August 21, 1978, with his wife Ray passing on exactly ten years to the day, in 1988. The two are interred together next to each other at the Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

CHARLES AND RAY EAMES CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
From this experience with the military, the designers went on to utilize plywood for furniture design, and began creating pieces such as Dining Chair Wood (the DCW), and the Lounge Chair Wood and Metal (LCW and LCM respectively). This utilitarian philosophy can be understood in their goal, which was that they saw upholstery as unnecessary, and by molding a shell as the seat to fit the contours of the body, one wouldn’t even need cushioning.

Of course, not every design of theirs would be without upholstering, and in fact, one of their most famous pieces, the Eames Lounge Chair would be not only one of their most popular designs, but also their most expensive. This simple black leather and brown plywood construction is not only elegant in its simplicity, but also generously luxurious. Charles’ stated vision for the chair was to capture, “the warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman’s mitt,” and the designers seemed to execute that idea entirely. Of course, since the utter success of this style of chair and due to the impact that the designers had in their lifetimes, examples of the chair can be permanently found in galleries across America – a rosewood Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman permanently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, one in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, and another in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
The simple fact that one can get a chair and ottoman combination permanently placed in Museums speaks highly of their accomplishments and their contributions to our daily lives!
Of course, many of their other designs are almost invisible nowadays due to their ubiquity. Charles and Ray Eames Molded Plastic chair, for instance, graces everything from cafes to schools and everywhere in between, almost becoming the de-facto seating choice all across North America. It, likewise, is true to Charles and Ray Eames philosophy of simplicity and functionality, while still maintaining comfort.

FUN FACTS
They turned down an opportunity to redesign the Budweiser label, because of their commitment to the notion to only, “innovate as a last resort.”
They loved the circus and especially clown acts. Because of their love of entertainment that combined fun and effort, they deeply respected the performers and their routines, and Charles himself eventually became a school trustee at the Barnum and Bailey Clown College.
Charles designed a series of churches in the 1930’s to support himself.
They were good friends with Billy Wilder and Charles was quoted saying that he and Ray “learned more about architecture from watching a Billy Wilder film than talking to most architects.”
They wrote the India Report, which invigorated industry and design in India.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Ray and Charles Eames have contributed much in the time they spent on this earth, from architectural and design revolutions to film and exhibitions, they truly had their hands in all kinds of creation and business. They have been heavily awarded, including being the recipients of the Royal Gold Medal and the Twenty-Five Year Award from the American Institute of Architects. They have even been immortalized on June 17th, 2008, in the form of a pane of 16 stamps created by the US Postal Service. Musart is proud to present Charles and Ray Eames work and designs on our website, due to their innovation, their creativity, and their brilliance.

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Reimagine Pop Culture with Lichtenstein Art

Roy Lichtenstein is one of the prime contributors to the Pop Art movement. Lichtenstein art essentially paved the way for more commercial styles of art to flourish by blending the “low” and “high” forms of art and create something new. Using comic books and advertisements as inspiration, he reimagined pop culture through a highly skilled and critical lens. Lichtenstein eventually established his own and very unique voice.

Read More about LICHTENSTEIN
One of his most famous, and certainly his most effective pieces, Whaam! is a stellar example of his ability to create stunning works of art. Whaam! is styled after energetic comic stills, and also feature his ability to create a consistent and well-composed image. The diptych is hailed for its expressive power and integration of subjects, and remains a fantastic piece of work.
Lichtenstein art achieved success worldwide, yet would still often be criticized for his methods and choices of subject matter. Despite this, he remains seen as a definitive example of the Pop Art movement and a master artist in his own right.
Discover Lichtenstein art brand new items Musart Boutique has carefully selected for you and own a piece of Museum.

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TIFFANY COOPER
Born in 1985, Tiffany Cooper studied at the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts, but chose to work as a gallery assistant and retail sales coordinator for luxury brands, rather than a risk in the unstable creative job market. Once she attained a position of responsibility, she found herself living in overpriced lodgings following a stultifying routine. She walked away from it all to travel and create an illustrated blog, The Best of All Possible Worlds, where she laughed about her jobless state, teased Karl Lagerfeld, and delved into existential questions of the highest order. Her blog attracted lots of attention and allowed her to publish her first book (The Best of All Possible Worlds- Le Meilleur des Mondes Possibles in French). She became an author/illustrator, regularly contributing to magazines (Voici, EllE, Milk, Madame Figaro) and working with the Colette concept store as well as several publishers (Delcourt, Eyrolles, Marabout…). In 2015, she was invited by Karl Lagerfeld to collaborate with his brand : an exhibition, a capsule collection, a short animated film, illustrations for the Karl Daily and a graphic novel about Karl Lagerfeld’s life (Karl’s Secrets, 2015). Her latest book Fairy Tales as seen by Tiffany Cooper came out in September 2016.

And I’m happy to tell you that her art is going to be accessible in Dubai through our online shop.

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I’m sure everyone who has been home furnishing shopping have seen these objects, but did you ever ask who was behind it or where did it come from? It was started by an Italian man called Alessandro Mendini who is a postmodernist making witty designs which are inspired by art.

Decades before the phrase ‘design-art’ become ubiquitous, Alessandro Mendini(1931) was doing his own version of the idea. In the late 1970s and early 80s, when Milan was emerging as the new design centre of the world, he put forward a postmodernist vision that borrowed from disparate sources, such as  mass-produced pieces and historical styles.

He played an important part in the development of Italian design. He also worked, aside from his artistic career, for Casabella, Modo and Domus magazines.

His design has been characterized by his strong interest in mixing different cultures and different forms of expression; he creates graphics, furniture, interiors, paintings and architectures and wrote several articles and books; he is also renowned as an enthusiastic member of jury in architectural competition for young designers. Along with Branzi and Sottsass and with his presence in Global Tools and Radical design, he was the main force behind the renovation of Italian design in the 80’s. In the late 70’s he went back to designing and various projects and in 1979 joined the Alchimia Studio. This group of radical designers in the 80’s in Memphis had upset functionalist designers by designing objects for sheer artistic pleasure and by referring to popular culture and kitsch. This was well outside the norms of industrial production and practicality. With Alchima he created objects, furniture, environments, paintings, installations and architectural works. Among his most significant works during this period were the Groningen Museum and the reinvention of the Alessi image for whom he is meta-projectual consultant. In 1989 he opened the Atelier Mendini in Milan with his brother Francesco and continued his career as a sophisticated, pop designer. The key element is always a clever hybrid between art and design resulting in popular objects that achieve great commercial success.