Creative Edition_Monique Baumann

For Milan Design Week 2023, Swiss artist Monique Baumann was invited to reinterpret some pieces from the Kartell • LAUFEN collection with her eclectic style that mixes colours, materials and different compositional techniques. The result is a collection of ceramics and faucet storage plates that each includes three original artworks inspired by her work with matter and colour.

Monique Baumann’s edition will be presented at the Milan Design Week as part of the new LAUFEN space collection, which brings together some of the most extraordinary projects from recent years, resulting from the brand’s collaborations with some of the best-known designers, architects and artists.

Most typical for her work, Baumann uses a wide range of materials, from photographic prints, paper cut-outs, drawings, adhesive tapes, cardboard and posters. She relies on an extremely spontaneous and analog creative process that produces a different work each time, in an innovative anarchy that allows images and forms to dissolve, new images to emerge, and new meanings to appear.

LAUFEN has given Monique Baumann carte blanche to let her creative process unfold. The resulting three artworks designed for the bathroom differ greatly from each other in the choice of colours and especially in the type of technique used - charcoal, paint and collage.

The three graphics have been applied and adapted to selected pieces of the iconic Kartell • LAUFEN collection, such as the large free-standing washbasin, the round countertop washbasin in Saphirkeramik and the wall-hung toilet. Thanks to the mastery of ceramic manufacturing that has distinguished LAUFEN for over 130 years, the artistic collages are baked into the ceramic glaze for durability.
 

Baumann’s bold aesthetic applied to the bathroom means a strong graphic work that features a new materiality. Colour plays an important role for her, it must provide energy and lightness, even black, as she points out: “Black, if well combined and balanced with white or other colours, has a delicate character to me”.

Using the same intuitive process and creative flow in colour, material and shape, Monique Baumann has also applied her collage technique to the storage discs of the new ADA faucet collection, offering two different sizes to adapt to the washbasin mixer and to the column single lever bath mixer. The objects with designs inspired by natural elements like water, stone and wood are also part of the Creative Edition.

The collaboration with various design, architecture and art experts is a constant stimulus for LAUFEN to find new solutions that make the bathroom ever more personal, pleasant and unique.

www.moniquebaumann.ch
 
LAUFEN’s space collection will be available on request through the LAUFEN spaces in Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Prague, Miami, Laufen and Milan as well as at selected retailers.