Estrella
Refreshing Art
With their colourful Mediterranean vibe, art and culture have been at the heart of Estrella Damm’s brand forever. In 2019 they sponsored us to produce an art program at the Book Club in Shoreditch, London. We co-curated a collection of exhibitions with the Book Club’s resident curator, Liat Chen. As well as being involved in the curation we collaborated closely with three artists to design a ping-pong playground room in the event space. These were Kelly Anna, Lynnie Z, and Jimmy Turrell.
Kelly Anna’s exhibition celebrated the female’s inner champion under the title ‘She Stole The Show’. Today’s society is filled with constant pressure and self-doubt whether through work, relationships or our online personas. Through this exhibition, Kelly Anna explored the dichotomy between these external forces and our own internal strength. With her strong use of colour, bold graphics, witty slogans and powerful figures, she examined the links between art, physicality, psychological persistence and drive as tools for coping in this new 24-hour online world we have all been thrown into.
Lynnie Z’s exhibition showcased an extensive body of work, deconstructing the studio space as a state of mind. Shining an explorative light into her creative flow, the show explored the experimental space where ideas and forms take shape, and characters and atmospheres evolve.
In the build-up to Jimmy’s exhibition, he bought a single job lot of around 1000 vintage books and objects on eBay. The lot included everything from 1920’s skiing manuals to vintage scrapbooks (of the Norwegian Royal family) to strange old boardgames and figurines. And most importantly it contained lots of old table tennis instruction books. He cherrypicked the most interesting book covers, board game parts, vintage postcards and ephemera until he had a really comprehensive selection of material to work with. For the show, he screen-printed, drew, painted and collaged on top of this material – sometimes using the existing imagery and book titles as the source for ideas and concepts and at other times relying on happy accidents and randomness to create imagery of a more abstract nature. We also built a completely new full-size ArtTable with a clear acrylic top to encapsulate some of the discarded objects and books so that they become a visual element of the game.
