Featuring the work of more than 30 of Britain's most influential designers, the British Council exhibition Lost and Found looks at fashion, product design, furniture and graphics. It includes new work by well-known furniture designers Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic, and Shin and Tomoko Azumi, and features the results of ongoing research by innovators Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Celebrated British fashion designers Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen are represented by their latest catwalk pieces alongside the seminal work of Shelley Fox and Jessica Ogden which continues to inspire a new generation of designers.

In the field of graphic design Lost and Found focuses equally on the latest projects by familiar names like Jonathan Barnbrook, Graphic Thought Facility and Fuel, as well as on the directional work being undertaken in interactive cd-roms and web design by younger names such as Henrik Kubel and Scot Williams.

The exhibition includes a day-bed designed by the artist Rachel Whiteread and a table by Andrew Miller, both of which are exhibited for the first time outside Britain. By bringing together design work by artists, and experimental work by designers, and uniting disciplines which are normally exhibited separately, the exhibition demonstrates how a new breed of designers has emerged in Britain whose work engages critically with ideas, and avoids easy categorisation. This new wave of designers uses concepts, ideas or questions as the starting point for design. How should we best make use of advances in technology when we are already surrounded by electronic pollution? What is the role of the product designer in a world already dogged by over-production? How can designers play a responsible role in using the earth's scant resources?

It is a critical approach, characterised by the articulation of the designer's own point of view in his or her work. The points of view made explicit in Lost and Found are much more diverse and often much more cynical than those of a previous generation of designers. Some are politically motivated; others are more interested in finding a way of articulating ideas in visual or formal ways; each of them is just as interested in the ideas which inform their designs, as they are in the finished product.

The dividing lines between art, design, fashion, music, architecture, clubbing and marketing are becoming increasingly blurred, and designers are drawing on all these influences in their work. Lost and Found shows design work and important contextual material in an installation by the London-based architects Muf, to show that Britain's landscape of design is now a landscape of ideas.

Michael Anastassiades, Shin and Tomoko Azumi, Jonathan Barnbrook, Dunne and Raby, Shelley Fox, Konstantin Grcic, Inflate and Ron Arad, Andrew Miller, Jasper Morrison, One Foot Taller, Tomato, Tomato Interactive, Vexed Generation, Rachel Whiteread, Martin Gamper, Anthony Burrell, Henrik Kubel and Scott Williams, FAT, Graphic Thought Facility, Paul Farrington, Designers' Republic, Paul Elliman, Nick Bell, Why Not Associates, Peter Saville, Russell Sage, Simon Thorogood, Jessica Ogden, Antoni and Alison, Boudicca, Ele-Kishimoto, Anna Nicole Zeische, El Ultimo Grito, Tom Dixon.

fully illustrated catalogue was co-published by Birkhauser, with contributions from Nick Barley, Stephen Coates, Rick Poyner, Caroline Evans, Marcus Field and Volker Fischer. ISBN 3 7643 6095 X ISBN 0 8176 6095 X (English) ISBN 3 7643 5998 6 (German) ISBN 3 7643 6096 8 (French)

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Design

    The arrangement of elements or details in an artefact or a work of art.

  • Drawing

    The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.