Followers of MB&F must be aware of the Swiss watchmaker’s dedication to mechanical art devices in various forms, so much that it has set up the MB&F M.A.D.Gallery for showcasing the beauty of kinetic art pieces. The latest exhibits arriving at the M.A.D.Gallery Geneva are the selected pieces from Smith & Winken’s ‘Endless Movement’ collection.
Founded by Ukrainian artists Valeriy Kuznetsov and Otto Winken, Smith & Winken was established in 2020 and their artwork is created with mundane materials for demonstrating connections between mechanics and bionics. The duo does not use software such as CAD or CAM at all in their creative process. Instead, they take inspirations from an art image, the beauty of our everyday world, or even in a dream, then manually draw their sketches, decide on the art piece’s size and proportions, and create prototypes using wood and paper.
The limited edition kinetic sculptures from Endless Movement collection appear as living organisms that come from either thousands of years ago or from the extraterrestrial world, yet they are made of organic materials including wood and textiles as well as metal. Many of the components are made by hands with the aid of machinery, and the movement is powered by electricity. ‘Thrinax’ is vaguely inspired by the image of a palm tree, while ‘Apollo 18’ is the artists’ response to NASA’s Apollo missions ending with Apollo 17 and comprising a whooping 484 individual components. The two versions of ‘Skipper’ make use of pulsating and light sources to symbolise life cycles, and the wide-eyed ‘Hover’ could well be an insect lurking from afar. The static images cannot express the beauty of these kinetic sculptures in full so do check out the video below.
