“Architect by profession, designer by adaptation, painter by vocation and writer out of the need to make friends” is how Oscar Tusquets Blanca introduces himself. The Catalan polymath is known for all of these occupations, having created everything from sculptural subway stations to sensual chairs, such as the Cupid’s bow lips sofas that resulted from his friendship with Salvador Dalí. When you include the books he’s authored and jewelry designs, Tusquets Blanca is in the Renaissance tradition of an artist able to excel across creative fields – an increasingly unusual phenomenon when many of his contemporaries go for super-specialization.
“The 10 years of intense friendship with Dalí were decisive in my personal and artistic training,” says Tusquets Blanca. “With him, I made books and furniture and created spaces in his TheatreMuseum in Figueres. My youth and the fact that I was an architect (his most admired profession) was the basis of our relationship. I can only say that he was the most original, creative, and amusing person I ever met.” Tusquets Blanca had already crossed artistic boundaries before meeting the Surrealist superstar. He started by studying fine arts, then graduated in architecture at Barcelona’s Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura in 1965. In the same year, with schoolmates Pep Bonet, Christián Cirici, and Lluís Clotet, he founded architecture company Studio PER, which became noted for its postmodernist buildings, such as Casa Regás, designed by Tusquets Blanca and Clotet in Girona in 1972. Tusquets Blanca also published an early translation of Robert Venturi’sLearning from Las Vegas, the early grounding text of architectural postmodernism. In 1974, Studio PER branched out into furniture design, founding the company BD Ediciones de Diseño. The move was not a surprising one for Tusquets.
“Being a student of architecture and having close relations with the 60’s and 70’s Milanese architects, my liking and vocation for furniture and objects was understandable,” he says.
BD Barcelona produced original design objects, as well as re editions of well-known designs, including those by Antoni Gaudí and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Since 2004, BD has also produced the iconic Dalilips sofa, from the original item created in 1975 by Tusquets Blanca together with Dalí, for the Mae West salon at Theatre-Museum in Figueres — the very first lips sofas were made in the 1930s. Tusquets Blanca first met Dalí in 1974, while designing a wing of the Theatre-Museum. This led to a creative partnership that lasted until the great artist’s death. Today, BD Barcelona holds exclusive rights to manufacture Dalí’s furniture designs, a collection that includes the controversial Xai, a little lamp-table made from a taxidermy lamb. “It is both the breadth and diversity of Oscar’s work that impresses us,” writes celebrated designer Milton Glaser in Encyclopedia, a book on Tusquets Blanca edited by Juli Capella. “He is a gifted and adventurous architect-planner, as well as a brilliant industrial designer, whose objects convince us of their inevitability: more like things that have grown naturally out of some organic process rather than any stylistic ideology.” Tusquets Blanca has won the greatest international recognition for his design work.
Outside of BD, he has worked with Alessi, Casas, Driade, and others, creating objects for mass production as well as limited-edition collectibles. In 1988, Tusquets Blanca was awarded the Spanish National Design Award for his body of work, and his pieces now appear in design collections at MoMA in New York, and Centre George Pompidou in Paris. His most celebrated work, the sensual Gaulino chair, was exhibited at Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1989 and awarded the ADIFAD medal. While Gaulino is an industrial product, machine-made, it maintains an artisanal quality and an individualism at odds with the neutral anonymity of a typical 20th-century object. With its violent angles, thin lines and sharp curves, it is evocative; theatrical and yet not entirely serious. Named for the combined influence of Gaudí and Carlo Mollino, today Gaulino is seen by some as one of the most iconic pieces of 20th century Spanish design. “Violence, sensuality and religion is pure George Bataille, a writer that I idolize,” says Tusquets Blanca. Many of his designs and architectural works reference Catalonian sensibility and heritage, yet he refutes the regional label: “I consider myself inside a Western tradition that flows from Pompeian paintings until Dalí.” Perhaps this is because he is not interested in the daily politics associated with the Catalonian identity: “Today, nothing looks so boring to me as the avant-garde. Dalí used to say that the politics is the miserable anecdote of history, an opinion that I completely agree with. Moreover, I have discovered that I cannot respect a profession that obliges you to lie. Design, and no other ‘Big Art,’ can be political.”
His latest project, a series of 50 semi-erotic paintings, is going on show this month at Room One, a new creative space in London, in an exhibition titled Hot Days: Fifty Paintings and a Chair. It will be the first UK exhibition of Tusquets Blanca’s paintings and will showcase the designer’s multi-disciplinary talent, with the artworks alongside a limited-edition series of 20 hand-painted Gaulino chairs. “Room One has given me the opportunity to show a pictorial project which would have been difficult to imagine in a conventional gallery,” says Tusquets Blanca. Asked about the one thing he would do if none of the normal restrictions of ordinary existence were in place, and Tusquets returns to his creative roots, “As an architect, I would like to design a school that, I imagine, is the absolute opposite of the present rules and limitations for buildings.”
Hot Days: Fifty Paintings and a Chair runs from October 2-31 at Room One, London.
