The Noguchi Museum’s Hard, Soft, and All Lit Up with Nowhere to Go exhibition draws striking parallels between the contemporary studio and the influential master

Since the dawn of industrialization, people have struggled to differentiate art and design: what’s expressive, aesthetically pleasing compared to what is practical, and accessible. This never-ending quest seemed futile to Modernist polymath Isamu Noguchi. For him, finding the right, perfectly-distilled, and timeless shapes was essential in transcending such limiting distinctions. Sculpture, regardless of being a work of art, stage design, lamp, or piece of furniture, can be functional. 

“I am not a designer,” Noguchi wrote in the Spring 1949 issue of The League Quarterly. “The word design implies catering to the quixotic fashion of the time. All my work, tables as well as sculptures, are conceived as fundamental problems of form that would best express human and aesthetic activity involved with these objects. The act of creating a fundamental form, though it may be disciplined by the fundamental nature of the object desired, is not designing in the accepted sense.” 

New York and Athens-based studio Objects of Common Interest follows a similar philosophy. The architecturally-trained duo—Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis—describe their approach as creating objects and spaces that are moments of unfamiliar simplicity and abstract empirical tools of social function. Whether creating sculptures or furnishings, they’re untethered by categorization or fleeting trends. “We’re more interested in how forms, without overcomplicated decorative maneuvers, can have secondary layers of experience that are revealed through use: illusionary elements that appear solid but are actually soft,” says Petaloti “We like [to subvert] common notions of function and aesthetics.”

A new exhibition at The Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York intersperses key recent works by Objects of Common Interest throughout the institution’s vast permanent collection. 

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