El Ultimo Grito: Garden Object, Rice Gallery, Texas

Garden Object is a new installation created by Spanish design studio El Ultimo Grito and on display at Rice Gallery, Texas, until 16 March.

The installation took five days to complete, with the help of enthusiastic students assisting at the gallery. Garden Object is a work of design innovation, having been created from only a few materials that included wood, tape, packing materials and bright, geometric-patterned stickers designed by the students. The installation transforms the gallery into an eccentric, wildly patterned ‘garden’ for visitors to explore.

Winners of the 2012 London Design Medal, El Ultimo Grito is a London-based design studio founded in 1997 by Rosario Hurtado and Roberto Feo. Recent projects include their public installations where they rely on their hands, bodies and readily available in-expensive materials to free them from traditional methods of production.

El Ultimo Grito has become renowned for its creative mode that returns to a kind of primitivism, before tools and machines could inform the way we design and think about design. Hurtado and Feo’s system is all about being hands-on. They create fantastical, yet functional, structures often binding everyday materials around hand-constucted wooden frames. They are made for people: to be sat upon, climbed over, played with, used and explored and they celebrate the public use of space and human interaction.

El Ultimo Grito: Garden Object on display until March at 16 Rice University Art Gallery, 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005. For more information visit www.ricegallery.org.

Credits
1. El Ultimo Grito, Garden Object, 2014. Commission, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas. Photo: Nash Baker © nashbaker.com