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Aldo Bakker for Georg Jensen – by Hans den Hartog Jager
When Aldo Bakker was invited to design a series of new products for Georg Jensen Henning Koppel (1918-1981) immediately sprung to his mind. “To be honest, the company Georg Jensen has always been Henning Koppel to me in particular. Especially his pourers are gorgeous. They are so elegant, you might even say sensual. Or take for example his famous Eel dish, which is undoubtedly an abstraction of a fish, but it also has a very clear mouth-like shape with pursed lips that function as handles to lift the dish with. The tension between abstraction, sensuality and the point where the object almost becomes a being is very attractive to me. For me Henning Koppel is as much an image maker as a designer.”
Although Bakker does not want to call Koppel an example, a lot of elements dear to him in Koppels work are also present in Bakker’s own work. Bakker’s objects almost always originate in a fascination for an abstract form derived from daily life – being either a safety rail alongside the highway or the lines on the facades of a 17th-century Amsterdam canal house. The fascination results in lengthy periods of observing and drawing in order to explore the possibilities of transferring the form into an object. Initially logic and beauty are more important to Bakker than function. Bakker has always been fascinated by an exploration into ‘archetypical shapes’ similar to the ones present on the paintings and sculptures of Cézanne and Brancusi. Meanwhile he also likes to look in a different direction: during his research Bakker investigates the possibilities of creating new combinations of forms leading towards new objects and new methods of use.
via aldobakker.com