A woman is standing at the entrance of Arte’s pop-up at Corso Garibaldi 65, woven from grass and raffia, life-sized, holding something out toward whoever walks in. She represents hospitality, which is the right way to open a Milan Design Week presentation, since by the time most people get to Brera in April, hospitality is the only thing standing between them and total collapse.
Gabriela Sagarminaga made her. She founded Sagarminaga Atelier in Bilbao in 2017, after a path that ran through Central Saint Martins, Custo Barcelona, and a research stint in Medellín studying social-impact projects. She came back to Spain and started making her first pieces at the kitchen table. The atelier she eventually opened now employs a team of nine and works almost entirely in plant fibers: esparto, linen, rush, wicker, rattan core. Recent commissions include rattan columns in the atrium of Hôtel Regina in Biarritz and a flagship for Hermès in Barcelona. The method blends European and Japanese braiding traditions with digital numerical cutting, which is how figures this large hold their shape without looking stiff.
A second tableau inside the showroom sets dragonflies and reeds against curved wallcovering panels from Arte. The wall texture shifts from geometric pattern to a denser organic weave across the bend. Photo courtesy of Arte
Arte, the Belgian house behind the show, has been making wallcoverings since 1981. The family business runs three generations deep: a grandfather who distributed paint, a father who pivoted to wallpaper, and now brothers Philippe and Steven Desart, who took the brand global from a 22,000-square-meter factory in Zonhoven. Their best-known outside collaboration to date was probably the “Extinct Animals” range with Marcel Wanders for Moooi, which Philippe has said gave Arte license to, “come out of its box.” Bringing in Gabriela for Salone is in that same lineage. It is not a wallpaper company hanging samples. It is a wallpaper company asking a sculptor to build a room around them.
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- Gabriela Sagarminaga at the showroom entrance. The Arte commission is her first project at Salone del Mobile. Portrait photo by Chris Force
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- Photo courtesy of Arte
For Gabriela, the brief was unusually open. “We really want to open the mind, what we can do with wall coverings,” she told me. There are, as she points out, a huge quantity of wallpapers in the world, and many different techniques for making them. The idea was to push past the catalog.
What that looks like in practice is a monochrome interior where the walls are not the subject and not the backdrop, but the connective tissue. Raffia, cork, woven grasses, and shells are pressed into surfaces that flex between texture and pattern. Her sculptures stand against them like figures pulled from a frieze and given depth. The aim, she said, “was to find color in a flat surface. Standing in the room, the surface stops feeling flat.”
