Jaime Hayon: Technicolor brightens up wintertime in Milwaukee with a colorful splash of fun and fantasy. The energetic exhibition features work from two decades of the Spanish artist-designer’s career, including textiles, ceramics, glass, drawings, and playground equipment. These works represent a wide range of approaches to making, thinking, and viewing, while also remaining unified by a refreshing sense of playful whimsy.

Jaime Hayon trained in his native Madrid and in Paris before directing the design department at Fabrica, the Benetton-funded design and communication academy in Italy, for nearly a decade. In 2003, he left Fabrica to focus on his own studio practice. Hayon Studio now has offices in Italy, Spain, and Japan and is acclaimed worldwide.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Technicolor, a set of textiles and ceramics which—like most of Hayon’s projects—began as drawings, some of which are included in the exhibition. Hayon uses drawing as a tool for exploration, allowing him to creatively construct the characters and scenes that populate his work. In doing so, he draws upon the fantastical realm of his own imagination and his wide-ranging travels. This includes his exposure to the bold graphics of skate culture and street art, which he was immersed in as a teenager. The details waiting to be discovered in Technicolor, from subtly sinister vampire fangs to topsy-turvy houses, provide ample opportunity for viewers to use their own imaginations as they experience the work.

Materials and process are also important to Hayon’s conception of Technicolor, especially the relationship between machine and hand production. The textiles were woven at the Tilburg Textile Museum’s TextielLab in the Netherlands on Jacquard looms, a centuries-old technology that automates textile production. Hayon brought this technology into the twenty-first century by incorporating new synthetic materials, including some that produce shimmering metallic surfaces for the weavings. The Technicolor ceramics exhibit a comparably hybrid quality; the vessels were manufactured by the Italian ceramics company Bosa before being painted by Hayon. This mixing and matching between machine and hand production is a common theme in the Museum’s Design Collection, which seeks to complicate the boundaries between art, craft, and design through works such as Hella Jongerius’ Repeat collection bowl, which dares to mix ceramics with cotton thread.

Finally, the most recent works in the exhibition are a set of glassworks, together titled Afrikando. Commissioned specifically for the Milwaukee Art Museum’s permanent Collection, this “family” (as Hayon describes it) of seven vessels infuses the storied history of Murano blown glass with Hayon’s unique sensibility. For more on Afrikando, look out for another upcoming blog post that will focus on this exciting new work.

Jaime Hayon: Technicolor is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum in the Bradley Family Gallery