NYAB Event - “The Amusing Style” Exhibition

“The Amusing Style” Exhibition

Pavel Zoubok Gallery

This event has ended.

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY invites you to explore the hybrid world of The Amusing Style, a theatrical, eclectic and decidedly collage-like approach to interior decoration championed in the pages of British Vogue during the Roaring Twenties. The gallery will be transformed into an immersive environment of modern and contemporary art and objects inspired by The Amusing style, with installations by a distinguished group of artists, designers and decorative arts experts: LOUIS BOFFERDING, LISA HOKE, DON JOINT, LIZ O’BRIEN and MATTHEW PATRICK SMYTH.

Coined by art historian and critic Christopher Reed, “the Amusing style” takes its name from the ubiquitous use of the term “amusing” to describe the arts and entertainments of the 1920s. An early declaration of the Amusing style as the new, modern look appeared in a feature article on the Sitwell brothers’ famously eccentric interiors in British Vogue in October of 1924: “For now nothing will be in a room for any reason save that it amused the owner the day he put it there. It is his character, not his possessions, the gives the room its quality. Hence if his character be sufficiently amusing his room will also be lovable.” Visual evidence offered alongside this thesis illustrated the character that unified this material and cultural diversity, with sitting rooms juxtaposing Cubist paintings, Victorian shell-work, gilt bronze furnishings, African fetish figures, and Severini paintings. Though celebrated by Vogue editor Dorothy Todd and fashion editor Madge Garland, high modernist designers, who largely focused on industrial materials and pre-fabrication techniques, eschewed this style.

Drawing upon the high-style eclecticism of the Amusing style, Pavel Zoubok Gallery has invited an equally eclectic group of artists, interior designers, and decorative arts dealers to create living environments that combine functional and decorative objects, as well as works of fine art, building upon the gallery’s longstanding commitment to the art and culture of collage. The exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to experience collage as more than an art-making strategy, but rather as a contemporary approach to lifestyle vis-a-vis our living environments, an expression of the self through the accumulation and juxtaposition of objects.