Soft Baroque

Soft Baroque’s Nicholas Gardner and Saša Štucin focus on creating work with conflicting functions and imagery, without abandoning beauty or consumer logic. They are keen to blur the boundaries between acceptable furniture typologies and conceptual representative objects.

Making plays a big role in their practice. They are designers and manufacturers of their objects. Their interest in various materials results in a diverse body of work. The refined, simplified forms of their works reflect principles of mid-century design, but the pieces also veer toward conceptual territory by evoking the malleability of how objects are seen and mediated today. Traditionally a craftsman’s practice would be in proximity to the raw material used to fabricate objects. In the same fashion Soft Baroque produces work in the context of metropolitan environment: processed materials manufactured for the domestic interiors are manipulated to unconventional ends. These new raw materials are converted into objects that still possess an echo from their intended use.

So far they’ve been showing work at the Swiss Institute, Friedman Benda and Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York, Venice Biennale and International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, V&A, Royal Academy of Arts, Christie’s, Somerset House and the Design Museum in London, Room 6×8 in Beijing, Gallery Sohe in Shanghai, Etage Projects in Copenhagen, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, A Palazzo Gallery and Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Depot Basel in Basel.