Masters od Slovak Design / JÚLIA KUNOVSKÁ
In the Mirror of Days
Source: Júlia Kunovská.
The furniture design of designer and architect Julia Kunovska (1949) is only one part of her extensive portfolio. She is equally focused on jewellery, interior design, home textiles and trophies. As an artist, she has always been and continues to be more of a solitaire artist. She has never been part of an artistic group and if she had any creative contemporaries it was her husband, the architect Ferdinand Milučký. It is their shared home, the iconic villa they built on their own, that is the best “showroom” of her work. There, she uniquely combined her postmodern design with her husband’s modernist architectural concept. Her furniture sets (the modular Box program), seating furniture (Form, Zet program) have a timeless quality and it is a great pity that they were not mass-produced, except for a brief episode in the late 80s and early 90s.
In the small sample of furniture objects from different periods which will be presented at Bratislava Design Week, you will see several of the artist’s approaches (modernist, postmodern, technicist, artisanal,). In creating them, the designer refined both the construction and the aesthetics of the objects, taking care to maximize functionality. She chooses the basic materials – wood, metal, linen, cotton, glass. Her Form seating furniture is very comfortable, it can function both individually and in assemblies. Júlia Kunovská has designed not only a beautifully clear supporting structure – a combination of wood and steel tube – but also removable textile upholstery for better maintenance. The hangers On a Ona (1990) have both the playfulness and narrative of postmodernism; the small stool was inspired by the classic folk “shamrock” for milking cows, but the designer ergonomically adapted it and added an abstracted romance to the backrest (reminiscent of Kompánek’s shape variants). The 4my half chair (1986) again shows both a fondness for primary colours and simplicity of formal composition while maintaining both functionality and comfort for the user. The Butler metal serving table (2007) has a sculptural composition, but is proportionally stable and easy to handle.
The exhibition during Bratislava Design Week will really only be an introductory study to a deeper exploration of her work. It will be a short trip into her world, where she is still patiently sketching, shaping, experimenting and enhancing her own knowledge and reflection of the everyday. Where she seeks space for joy and forgets the doubts so natural to creators who perceive the world in subtleties.
Furniture set ZET, 1980, source: Júlia Kunovská.
Interior, Manor house Moravany nad Váhom, 1984 – 1987.