Museum gift shops are a great place to find a wonderful souvenir of your visit. Some even offer original works of art. Now auction houses are getting in on the action. Yesterday, the auction house Phillips de Pury & Company is opening a shop at its 450 Park Avenue galleries. Designed by Markus Bergström and Joe Nunn of the London studio Glass Hill, the 600-square-foot space will feature a flexible, modular shelving system of black lacquered dowels and shelves. Members of the ARTKABINETT art collector social network can now list this among their destinations for fun art shopping.
The shop builds on the success of two pop-up retail installations — Connectors and the Projectory — that Phillips opened last year in its (now closed) temporary quarters at the Saatchi Gallery in London. (Those installations were also designed by Glass Hill.)
But unlike its predecessors, which emphasized contemporary design, the new shop will include more art-related content: photography, editions, contemporary art and artists’ books. “There isn’t as much space for furniture,” explained Brent Dzekciorius, Phillips’s director of retail, “so we decided to make it broader, and representative of Phillips as a contemporary cultural arbiter.”
Dzekciorius, who also curated Connectors and the Projectory, and who has a keen eye for new talent, is particularly excited about pieces like the Stockholm studio Humans Since 1982 which has a “Clock Clock” — 24 analog clocks arranged so that their hands tell time in what appears to be digital form (shown right) — as well as that studio’s “Hair Clip on Hair,” (above left) a commentary on religious rules governing women’s dress.
An arresting, graphic backgammon board by the artist Ara Peterson and his father, Jack; Ben Jones’s “Beehaven Ladder”; and Stephanie Solinas’s “Dominique Lambert Alaska Edition” are also on offer, as are pieces by the designers Study O Portable and Peter Marigold. And Dzekciorius is pleased that three designers whose work he chose for the shop — Seongyong Lee; Nendo, whose Thin Black Lines series was the subject of an exhibition at Phillips’s Saatchi space last year; and Max Lamb — were nominated for this year’s Brit Insurance Design Awards.
