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Making ordinary extraordinary: Hungarian design show lays bare the beauty of everyday objects
By Euronews Culture
Published on
The past, present and future of design meet in the Zsolnay Cultural Quarter in Pécs, at the m21 Gallery’s exhibition Design Icons – Yesterday and Today.
The main aim of the show is to demonstrate that, “in addition to utility value, aesthetics can also play a key role in the creation of an object,” says Valéria Fekete, artistic director of the Pécs Galleries.
The exhibition also features works by world-famous artists and designers such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Salvador Dali.
“If I have to highlight one or two works, I must mention the Objet Inutile, an object commissioned by Alessi from Salvador Dali in 1971, which is essentially the iconic piece of the exhibition,” adds Fekete.
The exhibition also features pieces from the museum collection of VA Design Studio by Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Gerrit Rietveld, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Borek Sipek’s postmodern and Philippe Starck’s timeless design objects from the 1990s.
According to the curators, one of the main aims of the exposition is to illustrate that design is not a series of closed chapters, but an evolving, living discourse.
Iconic works of the past, progressive trends of the present and possible trends of the future meet in one space in Pécs, giving visitors the opportunity to formulate their own interpretations of the objects.
Design Icons – Yesterday and Today runs at the m21 Gallery in Pécs until 1 March 2026.
