The Grand Carpet Comeback: LANG / REYLE

This week at Milan’s SALONE DEL MOBILE, Swedish luxury rug manufacturer HENZEL STUDIO will present collaborations with two very different virtuosos of minimalism: HELMUT LANG and ANSELM REYLE, who’ve both transformed the noble ideas of modernism with an attack-strategy of simplicity as complexity distilled. Interestingly, both Lang and Reyle have retired from their signature trades—Lang from fashion, in 2005, and Reyle from art, earlier this year. While Lang now devotes his time to making abstract and psycho-sexual art, it is unclear what Reyle—who manipulated found objects and proletariat materials into elegant monumentality—will do. “The question for me is only, how do we continue with this today?” he asks.

Covering a visual range from future-sheen to bio-corrosion, Lang’s and Reyle’s rugs for Henzel Studio create a near-perfect summary of the incommensurability yet inevitability in the convergence of art and design. Other rugs in the series—which will premiere in its entirety at Barneys New York during the Frieze Art Fair New York—include works by Richard Prince, Juergen Teller, and Mickalene Thomas.