Curated with the Design Museum and Sir Paul Smith, Great Brits is a showcase for the new generation of talented young designers working in Britain. It will be launched at Paul Smith’s headquarters during the 2005 Milan Furniture Fair.

Each of the designers in Great Brits – Pascal Anson, Michael Cross and Julie Mathias, Julia Lohmann, Matthias Megyeri and Peter Traag – is at the start of their career, yet has developed a distinctive approach to design. They share a passion for experimentation with new materials and technologies and for exploring the transformative – or alchemical – possibilities of design.

Pascal Anson gives new life to discarded objects by reinventing them as sets. Michael Cross and Julie Mathias test our taboos by making exquisite yet provocative lighting by immersing electric light bulbs in water. Julia Lohmann transforms the food industry’s debris - cowhides and sheep’s stomachs – into lighting and furniture. Mathis Megyeri investigates the twin obsessions of security and kitsch by customising burglar alarms and surveillance devices. Peter Traag creates ingenious furniture by working with banal materials and unconventional industrial processes from a fresh perspective.

This is the second Great Brits exhibition of the work of young British designers to be organised by the Design Museum and British Council with Paul Smith Ltd. during the Milan Furniture Fair. The first exhibition in 2003 helped to launch the international careers of Tord Boontje, Sam Buxton, Matthias Bengtsson and Daniel Brown and identified the emergence of a new romanticism in design.

In Great Brits: the new Alchemists, the curators, Emily Campbell, head of design at the British Council, and Alice Rawsthorn, director of the Design Museum, will explore the development of a raw, surreal design aesthetic that transforms base objects or materials and commonplace typologies in unexpected ways.

14 – 18 April 2005

Paul Smith, viale Umbria 95, 20135 Milan, Italy

October 2005

Tokyo Designers Block, Tokyo, Japan

For more information on Great Brits, contact: Emily Campbell. Biographical information on the desigers can be found on our Great Brits Biographies page