As I walked the Tendence gift fair in Frankfurt this summer, Iris Maschek appeared to me like an oasis of glam in a desert of practicality. There she was, surrounded by clocks and soaps and clever ceramic jugs with customizable chalkboard labels, dressed all in black and perched in a cool mid-century rattan chair against this gorgeously baroque Rorschach-like backdrop: A specimen from her first wallpaper collection. Maschek already has a successful career designing textiles and wall treatments for European brands like Rasch, Eijffinger, Creation Baumann, and Dedar, but having her own line leaves her free to explore darker, more experimental imagery and proportions.
First thing you ever made:
A cloth I wove when I was 6 years old. I made it on a small loom for children. It should have been a multicolored carpet for my dollhouse, but it ended up as a blanket for my cat.
Design hero:
My “design hero” is nature itself. No designer can compete with its creativity and the variety of shapes, colors, and functionalities it provides.
Album most played while you work:
I use music to put myself in different moods. The albums I currently play the most are Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories, Colleen’s Everybody alive wants answers, and Theophilus London’s This Charming Man.
Fictional character who would own your work: The Beast from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 movie La Belle et la Bête would probably be drawn to my wallpaper Lun Shade, which would fit perfectly in the gothic corridors of his castle.
Elisa Strozyk’s wooden carpet, the thing Iris Maschek wishes she’d made
Favorite design object: Clouds by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec
Style movement you most identify with: Bauhaus and De Stijl. Their basic principles of abstraction and reduction are essential for my work. This 3-D hanging object called Leda and the Swan, made in 1946 by László Moholy-Nagy, is like an exercise in folding space and time — very futuristic, and an inspiration for ornaments I made for my wallpaper collection.
What inspired you to be a designer? The visit of an exhibition of graduates from the Royal College of Art in London. I was 16 years old and totally impressed by the artistic variety of the works shown. I felt some kind of determination to be somehow creative before, but only then did I realize the direction I wanted to go.
Last great exhibition you saw: Isa Genzken’s “Sesam öffne dich” (“Open sesame”). She’s a Cologne-based conceptual sculptress, and I like her work because it’s enigmatic, odd, and very arbitrary. Another was a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois called “A Stretch of Time.” The power and psychological deepness of her works impressed me a lot. Bourgeois is 97 years old and the best example of life as a neverending process of creativity.
I’d also love to see the upcoming exhibition of Florian Süssmayr, my favorite painter, at the Nicholas Robinson Gallery in New York.
Favorite shop: Sign of the Times in Cologne, which sells furniture and objects from the ’20s through the ’80s. Some of my favorite design objects I found there, like this lamp whose origin I don’t know. When the windows are open the wind makes its golden spirals swing and clatter.
Name a celebrity and what you’d make for them: Aphex Twin — a.k.a. Richard D. James, a musician with an enormous influence on the development of contemporary electronic music — claims his music is inspired by “lucid dreams.” I would translate the album Selected Ambientworks into a wallpaper, trying to visualize its tranquility, beauty, and deepness.
What inspired your Munk wallpaper? The idea of creating a bordure or fresco with a slight historical touch but a strong contemporary graphical expression.
