Inspired by what he calls his “shape supermarket” or “cultural pudding”, John Armleder borrows from an eclectic mix of references, a blend of everything that existed and that exists. Picking up influences from different eras, artists or mouvements, the artist does not have any hierarchy. He reinvents what he borrows, takes it out of context and from there, creates a different story. This is where his message lies, in a world where today everything already exists, it is inevitable to reinvent what we know and build new narratives around it. Book lover and formerly librarian and publisher, John Armleder also takes his inspiration from his readings. For this new piece, it is from Ernst Haeckel's work “Art Forms in Nature” he draws inspiration for his design. Born in 1834, Ernst Haeckel was a biologist and artist who spent his life illustrating deep-sea species and other animals. His poetic illustrations are true works of art, showing a side of marine life which was unknown at the time. In his watercolours, the plants appear to be floating, peacefully following the movement of the water. Delicate and airy, they reveal the magic of these little-known species.

John Armleder (born in 1948) is a Swiss painter, sculptor, performer, librarian and publisher. He began to explore his artistic instincts in his early teens. Involved in the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, he participated in their disruptive “happenings”. They challenged the European bourgeois society of the time and radically reshaped the art world. In 1969 he founded the Ecart collective with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, which introduced artists such as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys to Europe.

Michael Craig-Martin is a well-established figure within the British art world. His hallmark style, minimalist and colourful, depicts everyday objects in a way that questions our vision of purpose and form. With bold colours and black outlines, the artist differentiates himself with graphic and cartoonish drawings of everyday objects. Since 1978, he creates two-dimensional images with the same visual grammar of colourful and minimalist paintings. He creates a vocabulary of his own, hundreds of drawings of ordinary objects fill his compendium of images, with which he then plays around to create his compositions. In a game of scales, he makes objects of different sizes coincide in his paintings. A pair of sneakers suddenly becomes as big as a suitcase or a set of headphones. After overcoming this first sense of familiarity with the painting, the viewer starts to reflect upon the function behind these objects, a reflection intended by the artist. In his compositions, the use of colours is as important as the drawing itself, it specifies it, gives it a different identity. The vibrant colours give sculptural space to the paintings while also challenging our preconceived vision of the objects.

Michael Craig-Martin (born in 1941) grew up in the United States and studied at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. In 1966, he decides to permanently move to Britain to live and work. His most famous pieces include An Oak Tree of 1973 which is known to have been an important moment for contemporary art. He is also known for having been an influential teacher at Goldsmith’s College in London, where he taught many of the Young British Artists (YBA) during the 1980s including Damien Hirst. In 2016, he was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his services to art.

Mark Handforth is known for his large-scale installations and his work is strongly inspired by his environment. Borrowing from ready-mades, pop art and minimalism, he uses elements of the urban landscape to create structural masterpieces. Lampposts, street signs and neons are distorted, bent, twisted and full of symbolism, confounding our vision of urban infrastructures. Often exhibited in the public space, Mark Handforth creates bridges between the man-made and the man himself. As he says, “Public art is a kind of release from the boring artist/viewer paradigm”. The artist melds a surprising combination of shapes and symbols with everyday objects, exploring the possibilities of art in public spaces like few others. There is a thread running through Mark Handforth’s practice. His work is charged with a strong sense of duality. Hidden or obvious, we can always find clashing elements in his compositions. While he unfailingly brings upon the viewer the unexpected, the surrealist with a touch of humour, he also deals with familiarity.

Mark Handforth (born in 1969) has a long history of collaborations with public institutions. Settled in Miami since 1992, he carried out a number of projects in the city along with then Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) or Art Basel Miami. As an advocate for accessible art, he also worked with the cities of Paris (Etoile de Bagnolet) and Zurich (Tessinerplatz) for commissioned art installations. His famous lamp- post series can be seen across The United States such as in New York’s Central Park and in front of the MCA Chicago.

Felice Varini is famous for transforming public spaces into spectacular visual displays. His installations defy the way people perceive volume, perspective, and design. Although often temporary, his displays are deeply embedded in the reality of the space he works in. His exploration of outdoor and architectural spaces embraces the history and complexity of the materials, contours and volumes. The artist chooses a single point of view easily accessible to the public which offers a unique vision of the whole area. From this perspective, the viewer will see a defined shape or design on the building, such as perfectly concentric circles or a set of lines that seem to cross each other. Visitors can then move freely around the space to discover an infinite variation of perspectives where the shapes almost seem to come to life.

Felice Varini (born in 1952) is a contemporary Swiss artist living in Paris and who has been all over the world. Among numerous public displays, his most famous installations are those in Cardiff (Wales, 2007), at the Nagoya University (Japan, 2008), and the village of Vercorin (Switzerland, 2009). He has produced several pieces in Paris, including at the Head Office of Peugeot and Société Générale. Notable exhibitions include the Grand Palais (Paris, 2013), the Singapore Biennale (2008), and the Niigata Water and Land Art Festival (Japan, 2009). He is an officer of “l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” in France.

Vik Muniz is famous for recreating art masterpieces using unconventional materials such as chocolate, ashes, diamonds or clay, Muniz creates to question our reality. In his reinterpretations of Caravaggio, Klimt or Warhol, the graphical depictions seem almost like they happened by accident. In contrast, his recent work focuses on rather abstract illusions. By using collages and new materials, the viewer’s perception becomes central to the artworks. Inspired by this vision and his collection called ‘Epistemes’, Muniz takes over a new media to create Trous. Muniz’s work always seeks to unveil the viewer’s curiosity. When we contemplate his creations from afar, they may appear as even surfaces. But as we get closer, we begin to decipher details, detect irregularities, noticing depth or height. Our perception is questioned and what we once thought is challenged.

Vik Muniz (born in 1961) started his career as a sculptor but quickly moved on to photography and drawing. Hiswork is part of prestigious collections such as the Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In addition to his mixed media artwork, Muniz is also known for his engagement in social justice issues. His movie Waste Land, which unveils the life of garbage pickers in Brazilian landfills, was nominated for the Oscars in 2011 and he is a UNESCO ambassador for human rights.

Dan Graham is particularly renowned for his pavilions made of glass and steel which explore the concepts of image and reflection, Graham created this buckle after one of these structures, Curve and Straight Line, built for Novartis in 2009 and part of the enterprise’s private collection in Basel. Graham’s work often brings together varied artistic techniques where he accentuates the separation of interior and exterior spaces by using reflection to cast doubt on the location of people and objects within the space he is working with. The artist’s work highlights how the environment can profoundly impact the way things are seen and perceived. According to Graham, his pavilions draw their significance from the reaction of the users who are invited to look in the mirror whilst being watched by others. The pavilions are instruments of reflection on a visual and cognitive level, a contemplation of the intimately voyeur aspect of modern architecture.

Dan Graham (1942 – 2022) was an accomplished artist, writer and art critique. He lived and worked in New York, but his art has been all over the world. His pavilions, in particular, are found in Europe and the USA, but also in Brazil, Israel, or Japan. He recently showed work in the Red Brick Art Museum of Beijing (China, 2017), at the MAMo in Marseille (France, 2015) and several museums in the USA. He has received many distinctions, including that of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010 and the award of the Coutts Foundation of Contemporary Art in Zurich (Switzerland, 2017).

Famous for his various illustrations of the human face using different medias, Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa has conceived a new sensational piece. The face is not overly defined, making it universally recognisable, a key attribute of the artist’s work. Indeed, Jaume Plensa’s pieces highlight the shared elements of humanity rather than the disparities. Similarly, he blends the old and the new by respecting the heritage of the materials he is working with whilst maintaining a keen awareness of our rapidly changing society, technology, and the way people interact with art and space.

Plensa combines classical sculpture materials such as stainless steel and bronze with natural forces like water and light, which he masterfully merges with the subject matter as well as the material form of his work. His works create overwhelming feelings of vitality and vibrance in exhibition spaces. Asked about one of his creations, the artist once said that it was “a beautiful metaphor about people. All of us are similar, but each of us is completely unique”.

Jaume Plensa (b. 1955) is an award-winning contemporary artist, known for his sculptural installations in the public space such as the Crown Fountain (Chicago, 2004) or the more recent We (London 2021). He has received awards both in Spain and abroad, including the Spanish National Prize for Fine Art (2012), Velázquez Prize for the Arts (2013) as well as recognition from the French Ministry of Culture and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

John Armleder’s work is filled with references that elude the modernist vernacular as well as any form of classification. For this belt, he drew inspiration from his “supermarket of shapes” and brought into life a visual identity that he had deeply rooted in his mind and memory. Throughout his forty-five-year career, he has produced pieces that could be seen as supremacist paintings, minimalist sculptures, high-design furnishings or any other easily categorized objects. As he explored various genres, he simultaneously tackled social economic and aesthetic issues. John decided to use the brain shape as it’s a complex form, which once drawn doesn’t express anything; it could refer to a walnut or make one think of an abstract drawing.

Throughout his playful compositions, the objects that are presented are often completely dissociated from any formal artistic concerns. He purposefully blurs the traditional lines between support and surface, subject and object, and high and low art. He also challenges the traditional pattern in which the viewer comes as a spectator of modern or contemporary art to admire and experience the piece in a set atmosphere for its display.

John Armleder (b. 1948) is a Swiss contemporary artist known for his work in the wake of Fluxus artists and John Cage. Armleder’s work spans different mediums, ranging from painting and sculpture to design, performance and installation. His artwork is a mix of influences from different artistic movements, among them Suprematism, Minimalism and Neo-Dada. Armleder often examines the context in which art is shown and considers exhibitions as an independent medium. He found his own creative vocabulary by blending abstraction with “sculptural furniture”.

Johan Creten has been an influential figure in altering the perception of ceramics within the sphere of contemporary art. The Flemish sculptor is one of the pioneers of the revival of this material in contemporary art. His goal is to express a wide range of ideas with this material in order to trigger political and social thoughts through his work that remains deeply rooted in everyday life.

Burdening his works with blemishes, Creten faces the inevitable with honesty. But he also produces monumental sculptures in bronze; their size and material strength are as overwhelming as the intrusive intimacy of his smallest ceramic gestures. Once installed, these objects – displayed on plinths or mounted on walls – are meant to be observed from specific vantage points that force viewers to slow down and engage with the piece of art.

With Johan Creten, there are not seven sins anymore, but an infinite and unlimited number of them. Creten’s sculptures have nothing to do with moral or sanction, guillotine or censorship; they rather speak of sins, of life that merge desire and pain, hope and misery, luxury and anger, love and death, Eros and Thanatos.

Johan Creten (born in 1963) has been working on the move for twenty-five years, from Mexico to Rome, from Miami to Amsterdam, and most recently in Paris. He started working with clay in the late 1980s, when the material was still seen as taboo in contemporary art. Yet clay represents Mother Earth, connecting the sacred to the profane. Creten is one of the earliest clay advocates in contemporary art. And he is considered, alongside Thomas Schütte and Lucio Fontana, to be a pioneer in the revival of modern ceramics, which continues to influence the next generation of artists.

Hans Op de Beeck is known for his lifelike sculpted figures and immersive monochrome environments made from materials such as coated wood, polyester and pigmented plaster. Those carefully selected materials transform his sculptures and installations made in a uniform shade of grey, and they make the audience feel like the colour has absorbed the world around them.

His work, infused with a tragicomic consciousness of the fatality of life, brings his audience into a timeless universe at the crossroads between dreams and contemplative silences. Op de Beeck draws his inspiration from one of his art pieces that reflects his childhood: Blackberries.

Blackberries are traditionnaly associated with loss, sorrow and guilt; but the fruit provides a more positive personal reading for the artist. Blackberries bring on pure nostalgia that draws the artist back to his youth's hot summers and his parental home's stonewalled yard. Just like Proust's madeleine crystallizes the theory of memory, he refers to the fruit as a symbolic item which consumption opens the door onto his memorabilia of the past.

Brussels-based artist Hans Op de Beeck (b. 1969) works to explore and revisit conventional historical art notions, such as panoramas, landscapes, and the German Romantic notions of melancholy as well as the sublime. Op de Beeck's sculptures, sketches, paintings and films often correspond to a simulacrum or to highly atmospheric architectural spaces. The tension between artificial and actual is the subject of these empty and anonymous spaces and his tension asks universal questions about the essence of the artistic process as well as the artist's status as an illusionary craftsman.

For his partnership with J.Hopenstand, Blair Thurman drew his inspiration from one of his art pieces Bacardi Circuit (2018). He transposed it changing scales, material and textures, that still represents his artistic world. The American artist whose work is considered to be at the crossroads of Pop Art, geometrical abstraction, Americana art, and childhood memories, introduces a creation with specific references that should be understood by the people who are going to wear it.

The eye is invited on this circuit that has neither beginning nor end; the gaze glides on the inside of the buckle, the pattern of which makes us think of a spider web. In American pop culture, this reminds us of a famous superhero. The presence of a hoop around it also reminds us of the dreamcatchers made by the Navajo people. This reference to Indian American people is made stronger by Thurman’s choice of material: turquoise and silver, which were often found in their traditional jewels.

Blair Thurman is well-known for his post-minimalist paintings, his neon lights and murals. His work explores the history of painting and its status in our contemporary society buried under the power of media. At the crossroads of Pop Art, geometrical abstraction, Americana art, and a few children toys, Blair Thurman works, with these forms, at creating environments and independent pieces that could change today’s advertising means of communication into abstract poetic creations.

With «CBB», Olivier Mosset invites J.Hopenstand to follow him in his considerations on changing colour. Mosset is known for his monochromes and his search for a self-referent paint. Through this partnership, the artist presents a buckle with iridescent colours and fleeting reflections. The piece of art comes to live through the moving eye of the spectator. Olivier Mosset highlights the range of colours that the eye can see through his reference to Harley Davidson, its bikers, codes and aesthetics.

There are four different buckles, all made with an industrial coating known as the chameleon lacquer. There are different shades to the colours as they change depending on the light and reflections, from green to pink, and from pink to golden. There, the monochrome meets its own limits as this metallic painting reveals the facing pigments, the iridescent colours and light, resembling a beetle or a chameleon.

Olivier Mosset was born in 1944 in Bern, Switzerland and lives in Tuscon, Arizona. He has always worked around the problematics of signature, appropriation and repetition. His productions reject all search for meaning, such as his multifaceted monochromes or his abstract geometrical pieces. He started his career around 1965 as Jean Tinguely’s and Daniel Spoerri’s assistant. In 1966, with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni, he founded the artists group BMPT.

In "Eye Shadows", Fleury's use of form, structure, and colour reflects rules and principles used in Minimalism and Pop Art movement while turning the make-up compact into an iconographic and cultural motif. The Swiss artist offers the wearer the possibility to play with a palette of interchangeable eyeshadows. The wearer is then invited to elect the colour that will reveal his outfit as if he chose the eyeshadow that will intensify his blue, green or hazel eyes.

To recall the texture and glittering of Fleury’s oversized make-up compacts’, we dress the “Eye Shadows” black buckle with hand-lacquered discs made out of pigments and metallic flakes. An approach that has a lot of similarities with car paint in terms of how it can be matte or shiny and that echoes Fleury’s artistic sensibility.

Sylvie Fleury was born in Geneva (Switzerland) in 1961 and still works there. Broken makeup boxes, gigantic lipsticks, shopping bags turned into sculptures, Mondrian paintings made of fake fur… Since the 90’s Sylvie Fleury has used luxury goods to criticize the mechanisms of our consumerist society, art and fashion. With her various works of all kinds, she tackles very different questions from merchandising to gender, and violence to contemporary mysticism.

They cannot be touched or seen ... They are 7 ... like the 7 music notes, the 7 colors of the spectrum, the 7 planets, the 7 days of the week. Spiritual centres, chakras rule our intellectual and impulsive qualities and contribute to our wellbeing.

What could be more inspiring than using invisible energies from the human body to create a work of art that you can wear? Sylvie Fleury did it, by choosing the sacred chakra named Svâdhistâna.
The sacred chakra, second of the seven main chakras, is also called place of gentleness, and is found at the belt level, where our emotions and creativity are located. Naturally related to physical wellbeing and the pleasure of life, this chakra is a combination of a six-petal lotus and a crescent moon.

The artist composed two versions of the lotus flower that can be either black, or orange and midnight blue. With a pink-gold and yellow-gold finishing touch, the buckle is then adorned with different lacquers, using a sparkling one for the center.

Sylvie Fleury was born in Geneva (Switzerland) in 1961 and still works there. Broken makeup boxes, gigantic lipsticks, shopping bags turned into sculptures, Mondrian paintings made of fake fur… Since the 90’s Sylvie Fleury has used luxury goods to criticize the mechanisms of our consumerist society, art and fashion. With her various works of all kinds, she tackles very different questions from merchandising to gender, and violence to contemporary mysticism.

For J.Hopenstand, the Berlin-born artist Gerold Miller was inspired by a recent series of works entitled "Monoform" : two angular parts of lacquered aluminium which seek to limit the space belonging solely, according to its creator, to the viewer's imagination. This is how the J.Hopenstand/Gerold Miller belts were born, and they bear a lacquered aluminium buckle available in three series. The pieces christened "Monoform Bleu", "Monoform Rouge", and "Monoform Noir" contrast with the black, blue, and red leathers, respectively.

Gerold Miller is born in Altshausen (Germany) in 1961 and works in Berlin. Miller works on the borderline between sculpture, relief, painting and installation. His works are experimental designs that argue with the minimal (form as constellation) and achieve the maximum (space as picture). Definitively freed of its limited function, the border between a pictorial and a environmental zone disappears in favor of a coalition between the center and the periphery, the inside and the outside. Therefore, the empty frame becomes an autonomous composition.

For those familiar with his work, it is no surprise to see that the German artist Wolfram Ullrich has been inspired by his geometric abstract art for his collaboration with J.Hopenstand. Sharp angles and clearly defined forms dominate his enigmatic cubic polygons. It was, more specifically, polyhedrons, geometric forms with flat surfaces, which inspired the artist to create the buckle entitled 'PRO'. Polished, satin, and sand-blasted finishes, as well as the various hues of grey, provide this work, which will adorn reversible ebony black leather, with the illusion of perspective and depth.

Wolfram Ullrich is born in 1961 in Würzburg (Germany) and works in Stuttgart. Ullrich occupies a specific position in contemporary art. Combining tradition and innovation, he creates works whose formal vocabulary comes from the geometric abstract art, especially constructivism. Since 2000-2001 , Ullrich works from polyhedra. The flat part of these geometric shapes is often colored whereas the edges reveal steel. Moreover the separation of the different parts of the polygon intensifies the effect of perspective. Ullrich invites us to go beyond the illusion of the first glance in order to appreciate these hybrid forms as such. Playing with lines, materials, colors and perspective, Ullrich remains faithful to the tradition of concrete art without succumbing to its conventions.