Cocktail DînatoireCocktail Dînatoire

On 13 July 2017 the last Thursday Night Live! before the summer break celebrated past activities of Het Nieuwe Instituut with a Cocktail Dînatoire for old and new friends. It was an inspirational summer evening that featured food, conversations with design studio OK-RM, Monadnock, live mural painting by artist Thomas Trum, pedalos in the pond, pop-in expo 100 years De Stijl stamps and music!

Watch the aftermovie here!

'Welcome to a world where beauty is as fragile as night frost. Where a small scratch is enough to penetrate very deeply into the surface, where nothing is what it seems.' From the Designing the Surface catalogue. Lof der Zoetheid provided a unique dinner inspired by the exhibition Designing the Surface, revealing that the finishing touches to every product have a purpose, whether to tempt, protect or imitate.

Oliver Knight and Rory McGrath are the founders of design studio OK-RM. For OK-RM, design is a conversation. Since they were responsible for the graphic design and exhibition text concept of Designing the Surface, curator Toon Koehorst engaged in a conversation. Topics ranged from their diverse design practice and how they stretch the definitions of graphic design to the specific content of Designing the Surface and the choices they made regarding this multidimensional project.

Founded in 2008 by Oliver Knight & Rory McGrath, studio OK-RM is a collaborative practice engaged in ongoing partnerships with artists, curators, editors, architects, designers and institutions. Recent commissions include the exhibition design and campaign for Fear and Love (Design Museum. London), visual identities for Manus × Machina (The Met, New York), the British Pavilion in Venice, and Under the Same Sun (Guggenheim, New York) as well as book projects with artists Fos and Shezad Dawood.

Curator Toon Koehorst also talked with architect Job Floris who, with his agency Monadnock, was responsible for the spatial design of Designing the Surface. 'The mural', a way for artists and architects to make their mark on public space, is an important part of the exhibition concept. How do they see the relationship between murals and architecture, and how do they assess the impact of the representation resulting from this?

Monadnock is a Rotterdam design office specialising in architecture that was founded in 2006 by Job Floris and Sandor Naus. They are involved in designing, researching, writing and promoting discourse in the fields of architecture, urban design, interior design and staging. Their work encompasses the scale of the urban space to the interior. Monadnock makes contemporary buildings that are an integral part of the cultural production of this generation.

As part of the exhibition Designing the Surface, Thomas Trum has created a series of murals in Het Nieuwe Instituut's café, each of which is made with a different painting or ink technique. Thomas Trum graduated from St. Lucas College in 2010 and completed the Man and Leisure course at the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2014.

This pop-in expo showed the new postal stamp that are designed as part of the celebrations of '100 Years of De Stijl: Mondrian to Dutch Design'. The stamps are designed by graphic design studio PutGootink and depict works by De Stijl artists and architects such as Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, Cornelis van Eesteren and J.J.P. Oud from the collections of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.