Hyundai Card brings first TOILETPAPER exhibition to Korea

Hyundai Card is presenting a major exhibition of works by celebrated independent art magazine and creative studio TOILETPAPER at STORAGE, from October 8, 2021 through February 6, 2022. “TOILETPAPER: The Studio” is the first exhibition in Korea of the art magazine’s site specific installations and art and product collaborations, showcasing the surreal and strange universe of TOILETPAPER.

Founded in 2010, TOILETPAPER magazine is a bi-annual, picture-based publication co-created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer and art director Pierpaolo Ferrari. In this exhibition, TOILETPAPER’s famous Milan headquarters studio is reproduced in Seoul, providing an opportunity for Korean viewers to experience the Italian duo’s unrelenting imagination and unique aesthetics. It is the first time for the Milan studio to be exhibited abroad.

“We always start with a basic, general topics, such as love or desire,” said Maurizio Cattelan. “Then, like a painter on a canvas, moving around and experimenting, we find ourselves reaching an unexpected point. The best images are the result of this improvisation.”

The most uploaded Instagram location in Milan is TOILETPAPER’s headquarters studio, a two-story building where crisp red, white, and blue paint sets the backdrop for four hands holding tubes of red lipstick. Inside the studio, attendees can find spaces such as office, living room, and garden, full of aesthetics absurdities. Various art works that appeared in TOILETPAPER magazine are collaged with mid-century furniture, rugs, mirrors, statues, and decorative props, revealing a world of colorful kaleidoscopes, a vision of the hyper-surreal.

Armchairs with roses in full bloom that blink as if they are alive, table with multicolored wriggling snakes, lights covered in sauce-soaked spaghetti, and walls painted with huge red lips screaming “SHIT” are beyond reality. The hidden world of the unconscious, such as greed, madness, hallucinations, and dream-like imagination, occupies the studio space as if revealing themselves in “everyday” clothes. The unexpected, contradictory and surreal landscape unfolding before the viewers’ eyes mixes with the collected melody of everyday sounds flowing through the exhibition hall, creates a daydream-like situation in our daily lives.

The boundaries and roles between art and design, fashion, architecture, and music are gradually blurring, and the hierarchy of fine art, commercial art, and subculture is also breaking down. Among these trends, between reality and the unconscious, familiarity and unfamiliarity, kitsch and elegance, the images created by TOILETPAPER continue to circulate and expand from photography to furniture, tableware, and wallpaper, allowing viewers to imagine and think more freely. Through this exhibition, Hyundai Card hopes that the free productivity of contemporary visual arts, which communicates in various and creative dimensions, awakens the consciousness and senses and makes everyone dream.

The admission is by advance Hyundai Card DIVE app or MelOn ticket site reservation only. Admission to the exhibition is 5,000 won ($4.20) for the general public and a 20% discount is given when paying with Hyundai Card.

About STORAGE by Hyundai Card

Located at the basement floors of the record shop VINYL & PLASTIC by Hyundai Card in Itaewon, STORAGE is an exhibition space originally born to “store” all kinds of contemporary visual art pieces. The themes and topics of exhibitions the venue has been hosting range from contemporary to experimental art, films, architecture and design. The blank exhibition space is where Hyundai Card and artists partner to curate non-traditional, interactive exhibitions with no boundaries.

In recent years, STORAGE exhibited “OSGEMEOS: You Are My GUEST” by Gustavo Pandolfo and Otavio Pandolfo, and “the Issue: The Hyundai Card Library Magazine Collection through the Ages,” a showcase of rare collection of Life, Playboy, National Geographic, Rolling Stone and Domus magazines.

About TOILETPAPER

Ironic, provocative, eccentric. TOILETPAPER is a picture-based magazine and creative studio founded by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari which originated in 2010 after a joint commission for W Magazine’s annual art issue.

The TOILETPAPER magazine is published by Damiani Editore and characterized by high production value and sharp humor: the images produced are instantly recognizable and combine pop and surrealist evocations, sexual obsessions, suggestions and ambiguities, creating complex orchestrations that mock academicism and self-referential art criticism with a smile.

The TOILETPAPER studio empowers brands and collaborators with its trademark use of iconic imagery, creating unforgettable campaigns, videos and products: from food to furniture, music and fashion collections. Each project is approached with a unique strategy designed to stimulate both audiences and brands through TOILETPAPER’s unmistakable energy and style.

Together with art director Micol Talso and their renowned team of graphic designers, producers, editors and filmmakers, the studio’s practice includes creative direction for multi-media international advertising campaigns such as Kenzo, OK Cupid, SK II, Lavazza, Costume National, Nike, Diesel, Galleríes Lafayette and MAC Cosmetics; publishing projects (TOILETPAPER Magazine; 1968: The Dakis Joannou Collection of Radical Design; and Kenzine magazine for Kenzo); product design for brands including Seletti, San Pellegrino and Gufram; and capsule fashion collections for MSGM, Santoni, Maison Kitsuné and Kenzo.