Collaboration
5×5, 5 designs created by 5 artists
Celebrating 25 years of Crypton with a collection of 5 designs created by 5 artists
When Designtex first crossed paths with Crypton, over thirty years ago, Crypton’s groundbreaking technology, which gives fabrics stain, odor and moisture-resistant capabilities, were still struggling to gain traction. It didn’t take much to convince Designtex president Susan Lyons, who signed up as Crypton’s first distributor. Together with Crypton co-founder Randy Rubin, our two women-lead companies have helped change the course of the textile industry.
To celebrate Crypton’s 25th anniversary and our enduring partnership , Designtex and Crypton once again sought to push the boundaries of possibility. Utilizing the capabilities of its digital printing factory in Portland, Maine, we commissioned five contemporary artists to each create a design, available in five colorways, to form an intentionally broad and diverse collection of palettes and patterns. With few design restrictions thanks to the printing process, the 5×5 collection infuses a breath of aesthetic ingenuity with Crypton’s already versatile range of uses. Easily applicable to hospitality as it is to healthcare, it is filled with options that can either take center stage, or create a comforting backdrop to a space.
Meet the Artists
Elizabeth Atterbury, Portland, Maine
A native of Florida, who now lives and works in Portland, Maine, Elizabeth is a multidisciplinary artist known for her vibrant geometric prints, textured reliefs and large wood and stone sculptures. In her practice, she continually interrogates themes of legibility, opacity, improvisation and object-making while considering her Chinese-American heritage. Her organic and serendipitous pattern ‘Social Dance’ grew out of a series of monoprints she first created for Wingate Studio, where she reconfigured plates of abstract colorforms to create a wholly new composition.
Arturo Guerreo, Brooklyn, New York
Born in Madrid and based in Brooklyn, Arturo is a self-taught painter who creates multilayered compositions that evoke complex imagery and a wide range of references. To create his abstracted forms, Guerrero pulls inspiration from ancient landscapes to modern technology, intuitively using thick brushstrokes to infuse his work with an expressive tenor. ‘Line Variations’ features warm overlapping fields of earth tones and cool indigo blue, which form tectonic plates of oil and watercolor and capture the organic nature of his iterative process.
Kapitza, London, United Kingdom
Sisters Petra and Nicole Kapitza both worked independently as graphic designers before founding their collaborative studio in East London. Together, they take an aesthetic approach to problem-solving, exploring the optics of geometry and color with the belief that color has the power to uplift communities and make us feel better. This could not be exemplified better than in ‘Criss Cross’, a syncopated, striped pattern in five brilliant colorways that each make use of a wide color spectrum.
Ellie Malin, Melbourne, Australia
From her studio in Melbourne, Ellie creates bold geometries and chromatic compositions using relief woodblock printing and painting. Her visceral artworks are inspired by observations of everyday life, which she translates into layered fields of color that purposefully reveals and conceals information beneath the surface. In ‘Five Cities’, Ellie combines tonal planes and overlaid cutout shapes to form a playful abstract composition with a layered and dimensional depth.
Phillip D. Stearns, Brooklyn, New York
Phillip’s creative practice toes the line between art, science and design. A student of physics and audio engineering before venturing into art and textile weaving, the Brooklyn-based designer and artist starts most of his works by writing code and experimenting with pixels, resulting in a dynamic fusion of the digital and the analog. His design ‘Bitdrift’ is generated from sections of a photograph, whose pixels have been algorithmically sorted and shuffled to generate a wholly unique composition. Created through parametric computation and cellular automata, it vacillates between order and entropy.
