"It is the middle of the night. I toss and turn on my burning hot pillow. Morpheus despises me. I hear the sound of a carriage coming from afar. I hear a horse trotting; briefly galloping; the sound echoes and fades into the night; a locomotive whistles in the distance. It is the middle of the night."
(Giorgio de Chirico)

 

From memory to light:
For the dark season, Tadan has turned two historical finds from the workshop archives of the Royal Porcelain Manufactory into light objects that do not illuminate the world, but illuminate the drama of form.

The starting point for "Horse Power" are two historical pieces by Paul Scheurich from the collection of the Royal Porcelain Manufactory Berlin: "Centaur and Nymph" and "Triton Embracing a Nereid." Tadan selected these figures because of their dramatic gestures, their narrative power, their rarity, and the beauty of the cracks in the porcelain. They have no functional use in themselves, and their decorative "value" is theoretically limited by fire cracks or missing pieces. Tadan did not want the figures to be repaired, but rather to exploit the aesthetic potential of these partly unique specimens, paying homage to the classicism of their form while simultaneously contradicting it in the same context. This context is the light, the stereotypical form of a table lamp in the style of the so-called "Foo Dog Lamps" (as we find them in reasonably Anglophile or at least tastefully conservative Hamburg apartments) and the technoid material: steel, painted in Ferrari silver.

 

The titles of the two unique pieces therefore refer not only to the human-horse hybrid of the centaur in the larger of the two examples. The "horsepower" in all its analog glory is also fulfilled in the Aluminio Lucido of the Maranello racing team. And in 2026, the year of the fire horse. And by the power outage in southwest Berlin in January. Our design engineers at Vinter powered the welding and painting machines with their electric cars: Hear a horse trotting, it is deep night.

TADAN was founded in 2022 by Stella von Senger, Sebastian Hoffmann, and Cecil von Renner. The trio works at the intersection of space, art, and objects and describes itself as "decorators." In this role, they design apartments and shop windows—including at KaDeWe—and conceive exhibitions. They understand light, objects, and spaces as a narrative medium that goes far beyond classic decoration.

The unique Horse Power items are now available at the KPM Berlin store on Kurfürstendamm and in the KPM Berlin online shop.