It could also have been a triangle, a square, a rectangle. Every other geometric shape that mathematicians, philosophers, writers, builders and artists have been dealing with for millennia, with which they work, from which they derive and derive. But: It became the circle that marks the starting point for the exhibition “The Circle” - the shape around which everything revolves. For ordinary people, a circle is a circle that blows up into a ball here and there. But for designers the strongest symbolic power emanates from the circle. It creates space for a thousand ideas and possibilities. It serves as a metaphor for the natural cycles, for continuity, repetition and infinity and can be revitalized again and again on the most varied of levels with zeitgeist.

"For me, the circle is the mother of all shapes," says Wendy Plomp about the essence of the iconic shape.

The 42-year-old designer is the founder of the Dutch design studio Dutch Invertuals, an international collective that, on the one hand, attracts young talent after graduation and, on the other hand, brings together established designers for commercial projects and exhibitions.

It now includes almost 90 members who, in addition to a larger studio in Eindhoven, are at home all over the world.

Day and night, life and death, order and disorder

Plomp is curator and art director of the exhibition "The Circle", which will open on January 17, 2022 in the Museum of Applied Arts Cologne (MAKK) parallel to the furniture fair. In fact, “The Circle” is a series of exhibitions that began in 2019 during the Milan Furniture Fair and continued at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. So far, circles and objects in all colors and different materials could be seen. The impression strongly depended on the respective ideas, the results were always visually beautiful and haptically interesting.

Each designer worked with the material of his choice: from ceramics, textiles, wood and rubber to mirrored glass. In this way, mostly three-dimensional objects were created that symbolically represented the infinite alternation of day and night, life and death, order and disorder, of material cycles and systems. With this in mind, the exhibition should also have moved into the Cologne Museum in January 2021. But then came the pandemic. And instead of importing the exhibition in its original form from Eindhoven to Cologne, the museum director Petra Hesse and the two curators Wendy Plomp and Christoph Brach decided “to rethink the matter, to use the lockdown time to expand the concept ". Wendy Plomp adds: "This idea,We really enjoyed following the DNA of the circle and developing and enriching the exhibition. "

The basis of all thinking

What has changed since 2019?

Objects from seven Dutch designers are taken over, eight new designers are added, two from the Netherlands, six from Germany.

“The funny thing is that we haven't seen ourselves and our work live a single time.

So far it has been a purely digital process, ”says Elena Blazquez.

She is one of the newly added designers; she only graduated from the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen with a Master of Arts in June.

“We put the group together again and implemented a series of lectures in our digital meetings,” says Wendy Plomp.