Tiffany & Co. recently re-opened its renovated Ginza flagship in Tokyo with a very big artwork from Damien Hirst similar to his Cherry Blossom work. The floral-inspired design completely covers the store‘s front beginning as a blue backdrop at street level before ‘blooming’ and spreading upward — morphing into an enchanting palette of pink, white, green, and red ‘petals.
Designed by Kengo Kuma and Associates in 1996, the 580 sqm Tiffany & Co flagship has been wrapped in a reflective shell that evokes the way artisans cut jewelry.
‘The stone is slightly lifted up and the light can come in from the back of the stone,’ writes the Japanese architect.
This stone-like quality materializes as a set of 292 aluminum honeycomb and glass panels that KKAA arranged onto the facade at different angles. This faceted technique allows light to penetrate and diffuse just as it would when beaming onto a carefully-cut diamond.
As well as the facade of the store there is some Damien Hirst flower wallpaper.
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About the artist
Damien Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom’s richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended. Death is a central theme in Hirst’s works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep, and a cow) are preserved, sometimes having been dissected, in formaldehyde. MORE
