Blog | Jeremy Loves Popjects

Lladro Porcelain “Toy Art” by Tim Biskup, Devilrobots and Jaime Hayon

The Guest is a new platform for character design created by Jaime Hayon for Lladró Atelier. Instead of overlapping the congested market for platform toy art; it maintains an elevated orbit: associated, yet separate. It eschews cheap, Chinese plastic in favor of archival, artisanal Spanish porcelain. Standing atop its wooden pedestal, The Guest has a pristine quality that seems almost untouchable. And for most folks, unfortunately, it will be. The Guest measures 20 inches tall and towers over your toys with a price tag of $2,800.

Welcome to a world where no trend is too modern to be treated with tradition. Lladró, a family company based in Valencia, has been handcrafting fine porcelain since the early 1950s. Yet while Lladró and Hayon have worked together previously, The Guest is really their entry into the micro-niche of high end toy art. It’s a small room they’re in–with France’s K. Olin Tribu and Belgium’s Toykyo–but Lladró hopes to expand the genre’s audience. Will their existing collectors of cherubs and pastoral vignettes develop a taste for toy art?

The Guest: Artists

Lladró invited three “Guests” to participate in the initial launch of the project. Each “Guest” was asked to design two figures, the large in a limited edition of 250 pieces and the small in a numbered series. The result is “six creations reflecting the personal universe of each collaborating artist”: Japanese studio Devilrobots, artist and toymaker Tim Biskup and Spanish designer Jaime Hayon (left to right, above).

Tim Biskup’s Guests (shown above) are known as The 5th Guest (20.75″ x 7.5″ at $2,800) and The 6th Guest (12″ x 4.5″ at $775). The Guest project is an elegant way to merge Biskup’s current fragmented/geometrical fine art with his previous character designs.

Hayon’s Guests are shown above. Compare and contrast them with the Qees and Onion figures produced in plastic and vinyl by Toy2R during the last decade. Does one seem more like “art” and another seem more like “toys”? Does one seem more “cool” and the other more “kitsch”? It’s interesting to think about our own biases and perceptions based solely on the material.

Jaime Hayon toy collection via Jenx

I would definitely invite The Guest to my house. They’re gorgeous and perfect in a way that will polarize toy collectors. If you can open your mind to bone China teacups by Frank Kozik, you can learn to appreciate porcelain by Devilrobots. I spent a lot of time looking at the photos (direct from Lladró and courtesy of Designboom), and I went a little gif-crazy. The Guest is available now in select retailers, like FUTURE PERFECT in New York and online here. Click through for “antiquated” material meets “antiquated” file format: It’s The Guest Gif Mania! What do you think?

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Naptime & Teatime with Frank Kozik

Written on January 27, 2012 by jeremy

Fans of Frank Kozik‘s rock posters and vinyl toys might not immediately see how his work translates to pillows and teacups. Well, buster, that attitude is simply as shallow as a Satanic saucer (pictured above)! I went straight to the source to see how the designer of all things smorkin’ and rockin’ came to make objects for teatime and naptime.

JB: How did working with This is a Limited Edition come about?

Frank Kozik: Darren Riley contacted me via email a while back.

How is designing for a teacup and saucer different from designing for a Labbit or T-shirt?

The difference was it was a round flat thing that had to match up to a hollow cylinder.

[There's much more to this illuminating conversation. Click through!]

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Hand-Painted Big Benny the Dreamer

Written on January 27, 2012 by jeremy

Tam Dieu, aka Okedoki and one of my favorite Canadians, came out of her igloo earlier this week to hand-paint a new big Benny the Dreamer. The sculpture stands at 50 inches of hard(core) resin! A previous 4-foot fiberglass production Benny premiered at Toy Art Gallery last September, but this is the first hand-painted version by the artist. Check out Big resin Benny vs. Tam and original polystone Benny below for a size comparison that’s off the charts! O.G. Benny the Dreamer was released through VTSS last April and sold out quickly, but I think we’ll be seeing more of Benny in 2012…

New Gorey-esque Prints by Yosiell Lorenzo

Written on January 27, 2012 by jeremy

Yosiell Lorenzo just dropped his first silk screen print of 2012. During the holidays, he became enamored of Edward Gorey, and the late Amphigorey artist’s influence can be seen in Yosi’s new etchy/sketchy/owly print. This is a one color 8″ x 8″ silk screen signed and numbered print limited to 20. All prints come in custom envelopes, and 1 print out of the 20 will have the original owl girl drawing inside (as shown below). Each print is only $18 each with 1:20 odds of scoring an original. Even if you’re not a gambler, that’s a great ratio! Get on this now here.

Is It Zombie Time?

Written on January 27, 2012 by jeremy

Comic book writer and creator of The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman tweeted a sneak peek at Invincible issue #88 today. Like the hugely popular zombie franchise, Invincible is another comic published by Skybound. Cool news for certain, but what’s of particular interest to my sleuthing eyes is taking place in the lower left-hand corner. I’ve gone to the edges of journalism by creating this animated gif to show you explicitly. Certainly looks like zombies on some product packaging for Vannen Watches, doesn’t it? Hmmm…?

KAWS Statue Still Sells Out

Written on January 27, 2012 by jeremy

So, in spite of its critique, the KAWS Partners Statue (which is, by the way, made of plastic) has sold out in less than an hour at $180 each. Yeah, I’d turn my back too…

I’d like to go now to some commentary from @chauskoskis as left on my recent story on licensing and laziness in designer toyland:

Wish art toys be more like music or movies… No matter how famous you are, if you put out a low quality product, either a record, a movie. The people won’t go to the teathers or won’t buy the album… And the artist should return a year later with something much better in most of the cases… In toys, fans just want to have everything no matter even if they don’t like it either. I heard some toy fans, “Hmmm I don’t really like it but I will buy it anyways” and they pay 200, 300 for a toy. Weird… We are weird.

Indeed, we are.

And here is another great visual by @crazylikeafox11. Maybe we’re supposed to see this as KAWS conflicted? The artist is reaching out to grab the possibilities the ‘high art’ world is chucking at him, but his creation, the Companion, representing ‘the street’, is mortified? In this conceptual case, the fact that the “statue” sold out would just complete the story arc of the art piece.

But I’m not convinced. Since Warm Regards, KAWS has consistently been releasing products that laugh at his fame and his fans. Like another celebrity whose name begins with the letter K and recently had an “originalfake” wedding of her own, I see the tide turning on him in 2012. People like being part of a joke; not the butt of a joke. Morrissey sang it best 27 years ago: “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore“.

Licensing or Lazy? The Latest in Designer Toys

Written on January 26, 2012 by jeremy

A streetwear brand makes minimal changes to Garfield, and boom, the comatose cat is now an urban vinyl skateboarder. Ron English adds a skeletal grin to a familiar purple dinosaur, and it’s transformed from kid’s toy to collectible. Last year, everyone from SecretBase [here] to Unbox Industries [here] to UNKL [here] courted a Spongebob Squarepants license. And KAWS, bless his hype machine, released his laziest cross-eyed toy yet: Joe KAWS. Designer toys are starting to look a lot like Saturday morning cartoons.

Tony the Tiger by Ron English

So what’s really separating the kids toys from the “art toys”? 1) Price and 2) Parody. Price is an individual matter, but in my experience, toys for kids cost significantly less than collectible art objects marketed toward adults. To “parody” means to “produce a humorously exaggerated imitation of”. Ron English has demonstrated parody intentionally and consistently through his political pop art career.

For his next toy, he’s set to turn his hijacked cereal box character, Sugar Frosted Fat Tony, into a vinylized riff on Kelloggs’ Tony the Tiger. English has “humorously exaggerated” the mascot’s heft, but does it read as diabetic and lethargic or just kind of cheerful and buoyant? English has spent the last several years tweaking well-known characters into toy art statements. With this one though, has he gone far enough?

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You Are What You Eat

Written on January 26, 2012 by jeremy

Doesn’t this photo kind of evoke American Beauty? The difference is that rather than American Mena Suvari, it’s British Stacey Irvine. Also, the rose petals and titular ‘beauty’ of the former have been replaced with Happy Meal toys and heart disease in the latter.

Irvine is in the news because after collapsing at the factory where she works in Birmingham, it came out that the 17-year old has existed on an exclusive diet of McDonald’s chicken McNuggets since age 2.

Miss Irvine, who has never eaten fruit or vegetables, had swollen veins in her tongue and was found to have anaemia. If Miss Irvine were to eat three portions of [6-piece McNuggets and small fries] in a day, she would eat a third more fat and almost double the amount of salt than is recommended. But, despite being warned that she could die if she sticks to her nugget addiction, she still can’t resist the fast food.

You are what you eat. And Miss Irvine is a nugget (Scottish definition).

There are, of course, serious consequences to this type of habit. A less serious consequence of her craving is that “she is struggling to find places to store all the free toys and novelties that come with the meals. They currently fill four bin bags.” Hmmm…somebody should tell Irvine that there’s a thriving market for American advertising toys in Japan. She’s going to need some help with her medical bills…

Sad stuff. Read the whole article in the UK’s Daily Mail where I expect we’ll see this girl’s obituary in due time.

Soviet Prisoner’s Abdominal Art

Written on January 26, 2012 by jeremy

Photographer Sergey Maximishin, who served in the Soviet army during the 80s, took these photos in a Russian “prison museum“. The spoons, shanks and sets of dominoes were all culled from the stomachs of men serving time in the 1950s-60s. Once confiscated, the would-be weapons were lovingly labeled and mounted. Don’t judge me, but I bet people would pay top dollar for these in one of Fab.com’s vintage kitsch sales.

I’m going to go ahead and tag this one “edible art“. Click through for more.

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Do You Dream In Color?

Written on January 26, 2012 by jeremy

Radioactive Cats © Sandy Skoglund

When I remember my dreams, they look a lot like the photography of Sandy Skoglund. Skoglund has been installing and documenting her conceptual ideas for four decades. Although her work mixes nature and artifice, it does so without the use of Photoshop. In a 2008 interview, she explains the symbiosis of the the two realities: “A world without artificial enhancement is unimaginable, and harshly limited to raw nature by itself without human intervention.”

The Sock Situation © Sandy Skoglund

Skoglund uses common forms like socks (above) food, and animals to relate to the viewer. Many of my favorites from within her expansive archives feature cats, foxes and dogs that have been sculpted and painted. She says: “The animal presence to me is the link between ourselves and the natural world. You look at a dog, and the dog looks back at us. During that moment, we know that we’re not the only consciousness in the universe.”

When asked how our increasingly digital world affects her concepts and procures, Skoglund responded: “Digital media is the means and not the end. The end is still the same: to make each other more comfortable in a world that does not make much sense. And we make each other feel more comfortable by sharing our discomfort.”

Here here to that! Click through for more of Sandy Skoglund’s colorful photos. Then go click around her website until it’s dark outside and you don’t know where the day went.

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