Richard Smith's The Shuttle to be featured in Chance Encounters, a project established by the LOEWE Foundation which takes place each year at the LOEWE Miami Design District Store.

In a recent interview Jonathan Anderson delved into the importance of unexpected juxtapositions to his work and the creative potential that can be found in the cross-pollination of different art forms. ‘Everyone has something to learn from one another’ Anderson mused. ‘When different disciplines meet it creates this amazing unpredictability.’ These tenets are central to Anderson’s vision for LOEWE and they permeate the collections, the fashion shows, and the stores where garments are presented in a constant dialogue with objects of art and design displayed around them. Anderson believes everyone is a collector in one way or another; our homes are curated spaces, arranged to tell personal stories that are significant to us.

Kettle’s Yard, the Cambridge home of curator Jim Ede, is an ongoing touchstone for Anderson. It was here, in the 1950s, that Ede created his unique marriage of art, design and objects from the natural world. As a domestic space it adheres to a deeply subjective and personal logic - one that sees a conversation between a Ben Nicholson painting and a collection of shells or a Lucie Rie bowl and a piece of Georgian glass. Navigating the house is like playing a game of exquisite corpse in which one thing leads to another in illogical but illuminating ways.

Chance Encounters is a project established by the LOEWE FOUNDATION which takes place each year at the LOEWE Miami Design District store. Influenced by the associative nature of a place like Kettle’s Yard, the exhibitions bring together artists from various disciplines —art, design, craft and photography— in ways that explore juxtapositions of the unexpected. The Miami store has in itself been an inspiration for the project, housing an eighteenth century granary building, rebuilt stone by stone after its transportation from Portugal. It is a romantic displacement that Jim Ede would have approved of, revelling in the meeting of past, present and future and the transformation of a rural edifice into something majestic and temple-like. 

Previous exhibitions in the Chance Encounters series have included work by Anthea Hamilton, Lucie Rie, Paul Nash, John Ward, Rose Wylie and William McKeown: conversations that happened across art forms, media and time. This exhibition brings together the work of potter Sara Flynn, who has been commissioned to make a new body of work for display on the granary, alongside a major installation by British artist Richard Smith and over twenty photographs by the Sri Lankan artist Lionel Wendt. Shadows and the interplay of forms weave through these objects as loose threads. Flynn’s complex vessels become body-like when brought into dialogue with Wendt’s tactile nudes and still lives, and like Smith’s ever-changing installation suspended high above visitors’ heads, each encounter engenders something new, always changing, never fixed.