Long relegated to the status of an outward sign, gold is making a comeback in contemporary design through the back door, that of the material itself. Sculptures cast in bronze, amber blown glass, patinated mirrors, hammered ceilings: an overview of a brilliance that has ceased to be ostentatious and has once again become a matter of the workshop.
Gold was thought to have been relegated to the closet of the 1980s, the era of garish faucets and gilded moldings against a burgundy background. Now, almost unrecognizable, it has re-emerged in the most demanding pieces of contemporary design. It's no longer about creating a mere effect: the color gold is now treated as a material, with its varying degrees of patina, its veils, its opacities. What's at stake is less a passing trend than a return to what gold was capable of before becoming a cliché: capturing light, thickening it, making it almost tactile.
In the work of Dutch designer Dirk Vander Kooij, gold is never applied: it emerges from an accumulation of recycled plastic that is heated, stretched, and striated like a marine hull.
The Bubble Lights, stacks of translucent bubbles that resemble giant seashells balanced on the rock, diffuse a light that is golden only by accident, through the meeting of amber and the heat of the bulb.
This is precisely what makes them authentic: no gilding interferes with the material. The brilliance is achieved through transparency itself, not through plating.
With Rosa della Foresta, the Italian brand Som, conversely, presents a piece where gold is celebrated in all its intensity. The sculpture, in mirror-polished bronze, resembles a crumpled fabric caught in mid-movement, a frozen flow. The polish is so intense that the piece acts as a screen: it captures its surroundings, distorts them, and renders them as liquid gold. Here we find a gesture dear to Anish Kapoor, this desire to make sculpture a membrane rather than a volume. Placed on a white base, Rosa della Foresta clearly demonstrates how color, in contemporary design, is no longer an aesthetic choice but a matter of surface.
It is probably in interior design that color is rediscovering its most ancient function: that of warmth. The interior of a recent project by designer Maximilian Eicke, with its hammered brass ceiling and gilded arches framing a rust-colored velvet bar, embraces this concept wholeheartedly. Gold becomes a captive light; it bounces, spreads, transforming an enclosed room into a lantern. Far from being ostentatious, the overall balance comes from the textures (the velvet, the terrazzo, the tiger print on the armchairs) that counterbalance the brilliance. It is a gold that is tamed through contrast.
In the realm of auteur design, the Materials of Joy exhibition, hosted by Galerie56 in Tribeca as part of the New York residency of the London gallery FUMI, offers the finest reading of gold today.
The central piece, Stella Stellata by Sam Orlando Miller, extends a research that the artist has been conducting since 2016 on mirrors and rotation.
Composed of mirror fragments in shades of patinated amber and platinum grey, the work plays on a subtly broken symmetry, a centre that eludes us.
Gold is never uniform there: it is a mosaic of tones, a cathedral gold revisited in the manner of a cosmos without a fixed point.
Here again, what is striking is the modesty of the process, the glass, the metal, a patient assembly, serving an almost liturgical effect.
Finally, there remains the original gold, that of the cast iron. The Belgian sculptor Ozanne Princen, a former ballerina, makes it the exclusive material of her Eternal Silhouettes collection: upright legs, cast in polished bronze using the ancient lost-wax technique.
Standing 55 centimeters tall, limited edition, numbered signature, the object belongs as much to the world of sculpture as to that of collectible design.
What is striking here is the tension: the rigor of an almost architectural gesture, transfigured by the warmth of the metal. Princen also explores marble, which she describes as a more silent movement, the next step in a dialogue between the density of bronze and the whiteness of stone.
