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Versatile Dutch designer Petra Blaisse changes how we look at curtains, walls, indoors, outdoors, and the spaces in between. Raul A. Barreneche rifkes through the layers.
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Profile
Petra Blaisse's unconventional design approach is part dressmaker, part scavenger, part engineer, part choreographer. As the name of her practice-inside Outside-suggests, the Dutch designer of textiles, interiors, and landscapes sees the realms of indoor and outdoor as completely fluid and interchangeable: "There are common threads of scale, movement, light, and structure," she says. "The big point is the connection between inside and out."
Blaisse's multidisciplinary studio found a perfect venue, New York City's Storefront for Art and Architecture, for its first solo retrospective, which took place this fall. Storefront's facade of pivoting panels (a classic by Steven Holl and Vito Acconci, from 1982) allows the gallery's interior space to spill out to the sidewalk-a feature Blaisse fully exploited to show her work, which takes place both inside (textile and interior designs) and outside (landscapes). "The mission behind my work is to always shift," explains the designer, who founded her practice in Amsterdam nine years ago. "My work is not fixed at all; it flows, either with fashion or my interests at the moment."
Blaisse got her start at Amsterdam's venerable Stedelijk Museum, where she curated and designed an exhibition of the young Rem Koolhaas's firm, OMA, in 1980. Koolhaas was taken with Blaisse's treatment of his architectural models as part of provocative interiors of her own design, many of which employed textiles to great dramatic effect. "I always did these shows about other people's work, but I never had time to do my own work," recalls Blaisse. "I was just too busy."
Impressed, Koolhaas asked her to design the interiors of his 1984 Netherlands Dance Theater in The Hague-and Blaisse's own career took a liberating turn. (She went on to design all of OMA's international exhibitions between 1987 and 1991.) The highlight of the dance theater's interior was a velvet stage curtain dotted with gold foil circles that became a metonymic icon, known simply as "the golden curtain," for the entire theater. Excitedly, Blaisse recalls the glow and subtle changes of light...