In 2009, Emiel Hetsen and Sander Klaver founded the interior design company HKliving, with its headquarters in Dronten, the Netherlands. Under the central design principle of combining a classical styled product with a contemporary spirit, the company produces a wide range of products from furniture to textiles and ceramics. The three vases in this showcase are also part of this range. However, no information is available about their designers or the wider context in which they were created.
These three vases were strongly influenced by antique architecture and ceramics. The dominant element is above all the fluting of the ancient Greek column, which varies in a new form in each design of this series. The two slender, cylindrical vases bear two twisted circles as handles, the shape of which is based in detail on the volute capital of the Ionic column. Another vase with a slender ear handle was inspired in its form by the Nolan amphorae. It is characterised by the tense contrast between a slender, columnar upper body and a globular lower body, which gives the vessel a certain modern character. The entire body of all three vases has a matted, cream-coloured surface. Such a monochrome hue is in the tradition of classicism and was perceived as a pure, aesthetic ideal in its heyday and still unaware of the original polychromy of antique pictorial works and architecture.
Thus, the present vases, with their classicist formal language, inspired by antique models and combining them with a classical-modern reduced basic attitude, reflect a diverse and constantly expanding spectrum of the classicist style in the present.
Text: Sojin Baik