La Galleria Ca' d'Oro e' lieta di presentare in esclusiva a Roma i designer tedeschi bär & knell. Opere d'arte e straordinari oggetti di arredamento vengono realizzati con materiali di plastica riciclata, cio' che sembra superfluo diventa fonte di nuova creatività.   Our work is the means of achieving aesthetic and ecological targets. And everything revolves around the principle of recycling. Plastic packaging waste - from bags for potato crisps to bottles for fabric softeners - is used to produce useful “ everyday items. The original colours and printed brand names and logos that consumer know so well are all there; they have just been changed slightly by the manufacturing process. Each object is unique and become identity as regards shape, colour and structure. This individualism All objects are testimony of their times, giving insight into consumerism and, in fact, acting as a mirror of everyday life. (Bär + Knell)   “In my search for new creations……I consciously turned my attention to garbage, waste, discarded products - quite simply, the unusable.” (Arman 1961)   In the beginning there was not design. In the beginning there was waste. And anger. Hecatombs of plastic waste that had been collected by the Dual System from German firms and households since 1991, and three young designers, Beata and Gerhard Bär and Hartmut Knell, who were consumed with anger because this valuable, brightly coloured material was only being used to manufacture hideous brown drainage pipes, flowerpots and park benches that looked like wood. Added to there anger was their archeological curiosity about our mountains of waste which, like the heaps of fragments from antique excavation sites, contain a wealth of history - layer upon layer of the traces left by the material world and living habits of a modern industrial society with its changing consumer preferences that are characterised by the spirit of the times, designer fashions and marketing trends. And then, there was the desire to experiment - the stubborn search for technical processes that would make it possible to save the individual composition and historical nature of plastic waste and give it a new existence. This approach - at times a fanatically pursued desire to reveal and disclose - is what sets Bär + Knell apart from earlier or parallel attempts made for instance by Anna Castelli Ferrieri or Jane Atfield. While the British designer produces furniture from recycled plastic boards imported from America which, with their regular graining, are anonymous and uniform, Bär + Knell’s target was to attain individuality and uniqueness within the framework of series production, a target they have achieved with their massproduced one-offs. In a long form-finding process designs were developed to comply with the specific nature of the materials. In the extreme case, there are also cushions consisting of transparent plastic covers filled with cleaned but otherwise unprocessed plastic packaging waste. This is where the circle closes to Nouveau Réalisme and Pop Art, from which Bär + Knell consistently show that supposedly useless things can, in fact, be reused. Their objects arise like a colourful phoenix from our mountains of waste. (Prof. Dr. Florian Hufnagl Executive Director, die Neue Sammlung, Munich)