Tom Dixon talks JOY - Food, art, plants and futuristic furniture

“Art and food, in my mind, are entwined,"says designer Tom Dixon, who – with chef Stevie Parle – is responsible for JOY, a bespoke, plant-filled pop-up restaurant at Sotheby’s London galleries, during Modern British & Irish Art this November. "I see artists as diving into life - and that includes food and drink".

In October 2020, Dixon and Parle staged a temporary JOY restaurant in London’s Portobello,which was described by a lockdown-weary The Guardian as “a momentary burst of feel-good… that reminds us life is worth living.”

The pair aim to transfer that mood to Mayfair this November – with a ramped up, expansive cultural flavour. Following their fleeting Portobello site and a new café on Marylebone High Street that serves food amidst a jungle of house plants, their jubilant vision arrives at Sotheby’s New Bond Street for what is as much an art and design installation as it is a haven to relish Margate seabass, Galloway beef and pickled elderberries.

Dixon will furnish the pop-up – situated in Sotheby’s East Galleries – with some of his finest pieces of furniture and a daringly innovative lighting system, all of which is available to purchase. These will be complemented with exhibited Modern British masterpieces by Lowry, Riley, Nicholson, Hepworth, Moore and others which will be in the Modern British and Irish sale on November 18th.

“I’ve always loved stories of artists paying for their food with a sketch on a napkin,” Dixon says (without confirming whether this method of payment will be accepted at JOY). “There’s a long history of restaurants like La Colombe d’Or in the south of France or La Palette in Paris, where artists have really been involved, where the art is intrinsic. The fact that at Sotheby’s we’ve got who-knows-how many millions of pounds worth of art from a period that I feel close to, means we’ve got the décor there already.”

Self-taught, Dixon describes himself as an “accidental designer”. Whilst his first creative endeavour was as bassist for the early-1980s disco band Funkapolitan, a love of making things soon morphed into a career that has resulted in an OBE for services to British design and works such as his calligraphic S Chairs and nodular Jack lights, acquired by MoMA and V&A.

At Sotheby’s, diners can look forward to some sensational furnishing, including Dixon’s HYDRO Chairs (£2021 each), made from 100% recyclable, lightweight aluminium – no rivets, no welding – created to his design, by Hydro, a Norwegian aluminium and renewable energy company. “I like their narrative. Hydro stands for water, which is the water power that makes the aluminium. They’re making a serious statement about being a sustainable company.”

So, are environmental considerations part of Dixon’s studio practice? “I think they have to be,” he says. “The best thing you can do is make things that last and are either handed on or re-sold. The great thing about Sotheby’s is that it is a high-end recycling centre.”

Diners can sit at – and purchase – his signature Tube Primavera Tables (prices start at £3650). Each has a brass base and a tubular central leg, capped with a round Primavera marble top. “We’re no longer able to get the marble, so they’re rare,” he explains. “It’s a very extravagant green, white and black marble. You can make out natural images of landscapes in the patterns.”

The natural elements will be juxtaposed by some sophisticated, and rather futuristic, illumination, courtesy of Dixon’s CODE light sculptures, a collaboration with the Austrian architectural lighting specialists PROLICHT. Inspired by the lighting used by portrait photographers, his systems – or “artifacts” as he describes them – create flexible and flattering light through a series of LEDs peppered across vast modernist-style circuit boards. “They mimic the light you’d get from a window, because it’s big and it’s diffuse,” he says. “They can be ultra-bright or sunset.”

A shared passion for horticulture has meant Dixon and Parle have created a kind of culinary greenhouse at their Marylebone site, an approach that will also flourish in Sotheby’s. Flora can itself be a décor. Post lockdown, the aesthetic is particularly timely: “It coincides with a period when people are interested in nature generally and been cooped up in apartments and want a bit of green. There’s a plant moment right now,” says Dixon. The Sotheby’s restaurant, he explains, will be made up of “one natural element, the plants, one location element, Sotheby’s, and one furnishing element. The rest is down to Stevie’s cooking.”

JOY at Sotheby’s “encapsulates the fun that comes from bringing together so many different elements of British creativity,” says Frances Christie, Deputy Chairman of Sotheby’s UK. Dixon is delighted that his works will be amongst so many pictures. “I like the generosity of the hang which reminds me a bit of the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” he says. “I’d rather have this blast of imagery.” And that blast, from the chair to the table, the plate to the picture frame, has a quintessentially British flavour.

JOY runs between November 18 - 22 at the East Galleries, Sotheby's, 34-35 New Bond Street, London, W1A 2AA

Breakfast and Lunch
Monday - Friday: 9:00 AM~4:30 PM, with lunch served from 12:00 PM~2:30 PM
Saturday: 12:00 PM~4:30 PM
Sunday: 1:45 PM~3:30 PM

Supper Club
Daily: 7:30 PM

Bookings and further information available here
For Tom Dixon sales, contact: privatesales@designresearchstudio.net

Past Auction

Modern British & Irish Art

23 November 2021 | 2:00 PM GMT | London