Known for his diverse work — which includes industrial design, installation, curation, and performance — Austrian-born designer Robert Stadler has been engaging with current issues in a critical and intellectual way throughout his decades long career. For his special commission for Carwan Gallery, dubbed OMG-GMO the designer offers a wide comment on the relationship between humans and their environment, as seen through the genetic manipulation of fruit and vegetables.

For the OMG-GMO project and exhibition, Robert Stadler borrows the forms of these engineered fruit and vegetables to create ten ceramic, hand-painted objects that ironically transform the organic into something structural and functional. Conceived as a series of small-scale monuments, these objects both criticise and mock human manipulation of nature: a slice of a Japanese rectangular seedless watermelon becomes a stool, zucchini bend in a perfect L shape to create a set of shelves, and wheel-like aubergines support a glass coffee table, as a reference to Gae Aulenti’s Tavolo con Ruote.