Former curator at the Design Museum, Libby Sellers is fast making a name for herself on the global design gallery circuit with her guerrilla exhibitions, the second of which opened in London last week. Under the pleasing portmanteau of ‘Strativarious’, Sellers has again brought together a group of young designers, each doing very different things but whose work is linked in a less obvious way.

Gamper-Wright

Click here to see each of the works.

The designers in question are an international crop of four: Peter Marigold and Khashayar Naimanan from London, Simon Heijdens from the Netherlands and Nicolas Le Moigne from Switzerland. What instantly strikes one about the group is that, unlike so many design galleries, Sellers has curated a show with a theme and a purpose, not merely lumped together a clutch of new designs for the sake of it.

Marigold is showing his Split Boxes we so loved from last year’s Salone; Naimanan a project called Hidden Wealth Classic, comprising a set of porcelain produced by Nymphenburg with hand-painted gold detailing on their undersides; Heijdens his ethereal, digital garden, Lightweeds; and Le Moigne a series of outdoor ‘Slip’ stools made from Eternit (a concrete/fibre compound), manufactured with ECAL.

The individual projects are fascinating in their own right, experimenting with notions of geometry and space, perceived value and visibility, technology and nature, and materials and the limits to which they can be stretched. But together, as a carefully selected group in a curated exhibition, they tell us much more about design at present.

All four are contemporary examples of high craft. Value isn’t accrued through scale or drama as so much design tends to have been of late, but rather fine detail and hand finish. Each is quietly exquisite in its own way and as a show, symptomatic of a turning tide in design as a whole, which is surely Sellers’ point. Perhaps the most interesting statement made by Strativarious is that impending recession and all its incumbent knock-on effects will herald a return to design as it was during the Arts and Crafts period, which itself formed during a period of recession.