Artist Illya Goldman Gubin takes a playful approach to collaboration. “I think of the process like a game of Broken Telephone,” the Ukrainian-born, Berlin-based artist tells us. “A group of children sit in a circle and take it in turns to whisper the same story to one another.” Slowly, unpredictably, the original is morphed and disfigured.
This is how the sculptor, painter, and designer set about his recent partnership with ECCO. The Danish brand’s new Metropole Seoul Derby was the starting point, the raw material – a timeless design onto which Goldman Gubin was given the freedom to project his own “romanticized, childlike” interpretation.
The finished product (though the word ‘product’ here is misleading) is more a collectible artwork than a shoe, strictly limited to a run of 100 pieces. A continuation of Goldman Gubin’s ‘Struktur’ project, begun in 2021, each pair of derby shoes has been modified by hand, encrusted around the sole with a substance textured and dark: a classic silhouette given a volcanic twist.
Shot in a stark environment — single chair, single table, dark walls — Goldman Gubin’s set design suspends his creation in a claustrophobic, clinical setting. Everything is clad in black leather. His Struktur material creeps up the bottom of the other objects in the room, as it does the shoes, like the whole scene has been dipped in a tarry puddle. The atmosphere is lonely, introspective.
ECCO and Goldman Gubin’s project interrogates our perception of everyday objects, subtly distorting their value. When is a shoe just a utilitarian ‘thing,’ when a fashion item, and when an art piece? What changes must an ordinary table undergo to become an ‘installation’? Giving all objects the same treatment, Goldman Gubin shows how a superficial makeover can alter something’s core – or at least our perception of it — fundamentally. In this case, hierarchies are dismantled. As the artist puts it: “Usable and unusable, art and fashion, all become equal.”
It’s these reality-shifting concerns that dominate Goldman Gubin’s work, and ECCO’s Metropole Seoul Derby was a perfect canvas upon which he could explore them. The artist’s multidisciplinary work has seen him start an atelier (I G G) alongside designing furniture, sculpting, and painting. Notwithstanding his carefully curated aesthetic, he refutes the idea of ‘style’ (a term which, in his words, “lacks depth and honesty”), instead maintaining a practice that “exists outside the status quo.”
The same could be said of ECCO. Never a brand to pander to the zeitgeist or jump on fleeting trends, the quirky Danish shoe manufacturer has remained, throughout its lifetime, resolutely in its own lane. For this drop, the brand is releasing a boot as well as the derby. Like the latter, the boot has a slightly squared front, a blockier heel, and a distinctly utilitarian feel. And, also like the derby, it’s (deceptively) as comfy as a sneaker. Both silhuoettes are available in black, mocha, and caramel.
Speaking on the finished artwork, Goldman Gubin says: “It became part of me.” In interpreting ECCO’s Metropole Seoul Derby, the artist successfully absorbed it into his subversive artistic world. But retrace the steps back through that children’s game of Broken Telephone, and you end up with something that is beautiful in its simplicity and universal in its application: a classic, comfortable, and subtly avant-garde shoe.
ECCO x ILLYA GOLDMAN GUBIN is on show from 6-10th September at the ECCO SOHO Store and from 12-15th September at the Highsnobiety Flagship Store in Berlin, coinciding with Berlin Art Week. The collaboration is available from 6th September 2024 at both stores. The full ECCO METROPOLE SEOUL range is now available here and at ECCO stores.