Pretty vacant for a hotel
A founding partner and former art director of Factory Records, Peter Saville has designed celebrated album covers for Joy Division and New Order, and, more recently, worked with bands such as Pulp and Suede.
His commercial ventures have also seen him cross over to the worlds of fashion and art, working with Christian Dior and Givenchy, exhibiting at the ICA and being an in-house designer for the Whitechapel Art Gallery. A retrospective is due to open at the Design Museum in May.
Since the line between high art and contemporary commercial design is growing increasingly blurred, Saville seems to be the right name to launch new East London art space Hotel - actually located in the tiny first-floor Bethnal Green flat of curators Darren Flook and Christabel Stewart.
Saville has created, along with designer Paul Hetherington, a limited-edition white flashing neon sign, a cross between the nervously flashing neons of Martin Creed and a minimalist homage in an otherwise empty gallery space. Unlike Creed, it doesn't offer any reassuring or ambiguous homilies, but reads, appropriately enough, 'Vacancies'.
Presented in a sleek, double-sided mirrored box, the glossy production values of commercial design belie the downmarket chic of East London's dodgier out-of-Hoxton environs. Yet, stranded on the floor
of this empty living room, the flashing word seems to advertise its services as a sort of desperate appeal.
Tube: Whitechapel/Bethnal Green
