Gijs Bakker

Gijs Bakker (1942–) is a key figure in the history of Dutch design and is best known for his work in jewelry design and for being one of the founders of the Droog Design collective, which in the 1990s brought an entire generation of new Dutch designers to international prominence. His career began in 1965, when he founded a small jewelry atelier in Utrecht together with his wife Emmy van Leersum (1930–1984), whom he met while studying at the Institute of Applied Arts in Amsterdam. Their jewelry was conceived as research objects, experimenting, for example, with the use of industrial materials such as aluminum or with fluid forms that produced unusual optical effects. During the 1970s and 1980s, his work expanded into the fields of furniture and lighting design, leading him to collaborate with brands such as Castelijn, Artifort, and ENO Studio. Among his most celebrated furniture designs are the Stripsoel chair, now part of the permanent collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the GB Lounge upholstered seating system, currently reissued by Karakter. Droog Design was founded in 1993 in collaboration with art historian Renny Ramakers and was based on a redefinition of the traditional relationship between designers and manufacturers, partly rejecting the pursuit of purely commercial success in favor of a stronger focus on style and conceptual content. The collective’s presentation at the Milan Furniture Fair in the same year marked an immediate success: the dry, conceptually dense language of its creations made the colorful, noisy, and somewhat superficial postmodernism that had dominated the previous decade appear instantly outdated, and helped launch the careers of designers such as Marcel Wanders, Hella Jongerius, Richard Hutten, Tejo Remy, and many others. Bakker remained product selector and artistic director of the collective until 2009, while simultaneously playing a significant role in design education as a professor at the Design Academy Eindhoven from 1987 to 2012—during a period in which the school emerged as one of the world’s leading institutions for design education. His son, Aldo Bakker, has also gone on to establish an important career in design.