On Sunday 19 April, Lots Road, an auction house in Chelsea, London, has over 600 objects going under the (online) hammer. Contemporary furniture, decorative items, antiques, artworks, jewellery, designer handbags, carpets and rugs are among the many pieces available for online browsing.
While the current lockdown and going exclusively online means no foot traffic, Lots Road’s analytics show that they are nevertheless getting more digital traffic than usual. A representative from the auction house says, “I believe that it is extremely important that all auction houses maintain an online presence at this time, as more and more of our buyers (and sellers) are operating online. We are remaining positive here at LRA, keeping our customers up to date with any current changes.”
With this positive attitude, Lots Road is continuing to run – and catering to their clients’ and buyers’ needs. So if you’re looking to do some online shopping, or even wishing for a way to whittle away the time, why not explore Lots Road’s catalogue?
Among the many items on offer are several high quality design pieces from renowned creatives (as well as those inspired by such designers), including Mies van der Rohe’s Knoll Barcelona chair.
The Barcelona chair was designed by the American-German architect and Lilly Reich for the German Pavilion at the International Exposition of 1929, hosted by Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It is one of the most recognised objects of the 20th century – and an icon of the modern movement. This present Barcelona chair comes in brown buttoned leather and measures 76cm in width.
Gabriella Crespi is another prominent 20th-century figure. She was an Italian artist-designer whose work spanned furniture design, jewellery and sculpture.
These various facets are combined and seen in this Gabriella-Crespi-style console table in cane bamboo, which curves around the edges like a bangle or cuff.
Even more modern, Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onwards.
Noguchi often regarded his coffee table as his best furniture design. It translates the biomorphic aesthetic of his sculptural works into a piece of furniture with distinctive organic forms. The legs come either in black ash (as with this lot), maple or walnut, and are positioned at a right angle to provide a stable support for the heavy glass top.
Finally, we end this tour not with design but with something for your walls.
The Connor Brothers are fictional characters known to blur the lines between fact and fiction: their – fictional – backstory began as a duo of twin brothers raised within a secretive and extreme Christian cult called ‘The Family’, which served to shield them from the mainstream media and other information in the outside world. It certainly takes imagination to come up with a story like that.
Each of their works plays on emotion, reality and the insecurity of the truth, as with the two Connor Brothers prints offered in the sale. Both are in the style of paper Penguin classics; the first is A Load of Fuss in blue and the second, A Load of Fuss in red. Both are dated 2018, are screenprints, acrylic and oil on paper, and signed and dated in pencil.
