Furthering Forma: Vanessa Heepen’s Exclusive Editorial Collaboration Blurs The Art-Design Divide

As the widespread interest in “The Room I Walk the Line” attested, Heepen’s scenography and curation in turn charmed a design-aligned audience that has revealed itself to be both numerous and geographically diverse. Heepen was inundated with portfolios of emerging designers and artists for consideration ahead of next year’s edition, both from around and beyond Germany. As to details on what can be anticipated, Heepen is staying tight-lipped, bar confirming it’ll take place in Berlin in 2024. While still situated in the realm of collectible design, the space and concept will differ, and contain an element of the unexpected.

Until then, how to keep up the momentum of the community that has galvanized around FORMA—a community keen to engage with the trajectories, nuances, and commonalities between art and design? Ignant Founder and Creative Director Clemens Poloczek invited Heepen to co-curate an editorial centered around furniture pieces. “I was delighted when Clemens approached me, as this editorial symbolizes the continuation of FORMA—like a new exhibition in itself,” says Heepen. “We stayed within a consistent spectrum of tonality and materials, incorporating certain materials like stainless steel, which – despite being a fan of – I didn’t want to over-use in FORMA’s first edition. Seen frequently throughout Berlin’s art world, stainless steel often reads as cold. For this editorial, combined with materials like wood, we wanted to cast it in a warm light.”

An open approach to the brief enabled Heepen and Poloczek to combine works from artists whom Heepen had shown in “The Room I Walk the Line” alongside others she’d had on her radar for a while. Furniture pieces by eight artists engage with smaller works by three ceramicists. Against a stark concrete backdrop of the Lobe Block, designed by Brandlhuber + Emde, Burlon + Muck Petzet in Berlin’s Wedding district, they started at 7 am. “The sun was just making its way up the terrace, so we worked with reflections a lot,” Heepen notes. “Alongside larger objects, we included smaller ceramic pieces, each distinguished through their unique glaze. We were interested not only in form but also in structure and surface.”