Project Materia 2025

Project Materia 2025 should be read as the beginning of a curatorial system, not a one-off design-week presentation. Its premise was clear: commission new works from artists and object-makers, then translate each artist's language into three historic materials, bronze, marble and glass, so that the finished objects carried both artistic authorship and material evidence.

The project matters because it repositioned editioned objects as a serious exhibition format. Instead of treating editions as secondary versions of unique works, the exhibition made editioning part of the curatorial argument: repetition, fabrication, certificate, surface and material variance became the grammar through which each artist entered the collection.

Context and site

The 2025 edition was presented during 3daysofdesign Copenhagen, at the point where the city is most visibly negotiating the boundary between design, craft, architecture and art. That context is not neutral. It allowed Project Materia to speak to audiences already primed to look at objects through making, material and spatial use, but it also asked more from the exhibition than ordinary product display.

The catalogue frames the exhibition as an investigation into materiality: its history, process and artistic potential. Bronze enters through strength, casting and permanence; marble through weight, architectural memory and the craft traditions of Pietrasanta; glass through heat, risk, transparency and the line between utility and sculpture.

Curatorial structure

The cohort was deliberately mixed: Andrés Reisinger, Cathrine Raben Davidsen, Forever Studio, Helle Mardahl, Jacob Egeberg, Laurids Gallée, Louise Roe, Onno Adriaanse, Willem van Hooff. The group moved across digital art, ceramic thinking, glass, object design, furniture, sculpture and collectible design. That range is the point. The exhibition was not asking one discipline to demonstrate three materials; it was asking three materials to test how each artist's language could be newly built through a material's capacities, limits and craft procedures.

Works and material consequence

Twenty-seven commissioned editions across bronze, marble and glass, presented as an editioned material study. Every work was newly commissioned. The logic was not to reproduce existing objects, but to translate an existing artistic or design language into new material conditions. Reisinger's digitally native forms made the shift into bronze, marble and glass especially legible: the image became mass, weight and surface. Cathrine Raben Davidsen's vessel language met glass, bronze and marble as carriers of mythic and ceramic memory. Forever Studio and Jacob Egeberg tested how industrial and interior vocabularies could become sculptural without losing their design intelligence. Helle Mardahl's glass-based world became newly strange when pushed into marble and bronze. Gallée, Roe, Adriaanse and van Hooff each used the commission to let material capability reshape form.

Holmegaard made the glass for Project Materia 2025. That matters because the glass works were not generic transparent counterparts to bronze and marble; they were made through a Danish glass context with its own institutional and craft history. The material argument therefore moved through three production cultures: foundry, stone and glass.

Edition Solenne's role

Edition Solenne was a co-founder and co-host of Project Materia, working across marketing, sales, collector communication and exhibition storytelling. It also helped produce the bronze and marble pieces, connecting artists' formal languages to foundry and stone production rather than simply presenting the finished works after the fact. Project Materia 2025 was a first proof that Edition Solenne could operate beyond a catalogue, coordinating artists, material histories, production sites, pricing, edition structures, exhibition context, marketing and sales into one coherent public form.

Press and reception

The 2025 edition was featured by Vogue, Wallpaper*, Dezeen, Elle Decor, Frame and Financial Times, with additional visibility across design and architecture media. The breadth of the coverage shows that the project crossed categories: it could be read as collectible design, art publishing, craft research, material culture and Copenhagen design-week programming at the same time. It entered the international design press as a model for how independent platforms can commission new work, activate craft production and produce market-facing editions without flattening the artists into product designers.