FOG Design+Art

Superhouse is excited to participate for the first time at FOG Design+Art with a solo presentation of new work by Kim Mupangilaï. The fair runs from January 23 to January 26, 2025, at Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA. Superhouse’s booth is number 501, located in Pier 2, part of the fair’s second annual Focus section.

For the booth, Mupangilaï, who recently was awarded The Boghossian Foundation International Prize, developed a new series of seating that investigates the Congolese origins of the Belgian Art Nouveau movement. Inspired by Debora L. Silverman’s research, Mupangilaï explores how late 19th-century Belgian architects and designers were able to exploit the Congo’s raw materials and artistic motifs due to their country’s violent colonialization of the indigenous people of the area to develop a wide range of decorative arts. With the series, the Belgian-Cogolese artist recontextualizes the lash, the vine, and the elephantine gestures appropriated by white Europeans and reclaims them for her father’s homeland.

The installation evokes a parlor in a bourgeois Belgian home at the turn of the 20th century. Mupangilaï curated a hanging fiber artwork by fellow Superhouse artist Maris Van Vlack, suggesting a large paneled stained glass window, the type common in upper-class homes of the period and which traces its stylistic origins to the Congo.

Visit www.fogfair.com for more information and tickets.

About Kim Mupangilaï
Kim Mupangilaï is a Belgian-Congolese, New York-based Interior Architect and Designer. Inspired by her heritage and roots, Kim’s work reflects the merging of cultures. The designer aims to bring a unique perspective and insight that encourages fresh discourse within the design world and beyond. She received a Bachelor’s in Graphic Design and a Master’s in Interior Architecture at the LUCA School of Arts/KU Leuven in Belgium. Mupangilaï contributed her expertise to numerous interior projects before focusing on her inaugural furniture series. She exhibited her debut piece at Design Miami 2022 and presented a solo show with Superhouse in 2023. Her exceptional talent and innovative approach have garnered widespread recognition, including a nomination and selection as an Honoree for the AD100 List Middle East & Africa 2024. She has participated in group presentations with Club Rhubarb, Schloss Hollenegg for Design, and R & Company, at which she was included in the Objects USA 2024 triennial exhibition. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum included her work in its 2024 triennial Making Home. Many publications highlighted her accomplishments; she received the cover of Milk Decoration and Sabato magazines, and Architectural Digest, Artnet, De Morgen, Dezeen, Financial Times, Galerie, Interior Design, Sight Unseen, Surface, and The New York Times have written about her. Several important private and public collections, including the Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein, Germany), hold her work. See more.

About Maris Van Vlack
Using traditional textile techniques, Maris Van Vlack constructs tactile images that reference topography, geology, and generational memory. The Rhode Island School of Design graduate’s work is primarily hand-woven, consisting of panels of fabric slowly built up thread by thread, trapping memory and history in the sedimentary process. After hand-weaving the base tapestry, she layers the surface with drawn, painted, and stitched marks and incorporates areas of industrial jacquard weaving and stoll knitting. Each piece balances the materiality of the fibers and the atmosphere created within the deep pictorial space. The landscapes in the work depict architectural spaces from her family’s history, referencing photographs of places in Europe destroyed during World War II, where family members lived. Her work is a window through which to see layers of time and memory, depicting the space between the past and the present. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Bromfield Gallery (Boston, USA) and Gallery 263 (Cambridge, USA), as well as in group presentations at the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós, Iceland), the The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, D.C.), and the RISD Museum (Providence, USA). See more.