The works of Borek Shipek - a progressive experimenter in the field of furniture design and interior design, a brilliant master of decorative glass

Passing the gallery

Text: Alexandra Shapiro

A photo: E. Olaf

Magazine: N6 (40) 2000

Everything Borek Shipek does is great. In the history of the design of the late twentieth century, he was "declared" both as a progressive experimenter in the field of furniture and interior design, and as an ingenious master of decorative glass. In addition, he is a professor of architecture and a professor of design theory. Pierre Stodenmeyer, one of the founders of the Neotu cult gallery in Paris, believes that this artist, in addition to "new forms reading, managed to set new guidelines for furniture design, which nobody, neither Stark nor Italian masters, could do before." Shipek himself speaks on the same topic as follows: "The most important factor in modern design is the manifestation of individuality. But those who focus on functionality, I can say that they are at a primitive stage in the development of design art." Indeed, Shipek has never been a supporter of cold and hard functionalism, and the trends of the high-tech of the eighties did not affect his work in any way. Any work of this passionate devotee of the absolutely irrational baroque demonstrates the powerful potential of decoration. As for individuality, there is no doubt: designers are always autobiographical in their work. Borek Shipek was born in 1949 in Prague. After taking a furniture design course, he moved to Germany. For the next fifteen years, Schipek studied intensively — architecture at Hamburg and Delft universities, philosophy at the University of Stuttgart — and worked. Then the designer moved to Amsterdam. It can be said that its furniture and objects are marked by lyricism and poetry, characteristic of both the Slavic soul, and the great Western romantics. It is worth listening to the melody of these names: Selka, Sedlak, Filzka ...