08/12/2026
Madrid, 1974. Hayon came up through skateboarding and graffiti before industrial design in Madrid and Paris, and that origin never fully left the work. In 1997 he entered Fabrica, Benetton's academy, moving from Oliviero Toscani's student to head of the Design Department. By 2003 he was on his own — and arrived with Mediterranean Digital Baroque, glossy ceramic totems in pink, blue and yellow, staged in South Beach and at David Gill in London. It read as a provocation. It was actually a thesis: baroque ornament, Mediterranean color, and play, held together without irony.
What followed refuses easy classification. A green ceramic chicken that is also a rocking chair, shown at Contrasts Gallery in Shanghai. Mon Cirque, a traveling circus of porcelain figures that went from Barcelona to Kuala Lumpur and was later reimagined for the walls of a Bristol hospital. Six Fauna tapestries woven at the Netherlands' TextielLab for his Groninger Museum solo, hand sketches translated thread by thread, imperfections carried through rather than corrected.
Then the scale grew. The Dreamer, a yellow giant standing watch inside Battersea Art'Otel. A carousel at Swarovski Crystal Worlds built from nearly 15 million crystals, folklore rendered in black and white stripes. Hope Bird, 4.7 meters of lacquered bronze, its base doubling as a bench so people can sit beneath it. The Castle of Transgressions, a monumental canvas of colossal creatures at Mindy Solomon in Miami. And most recently High Love in Seoul, a curious figure in curious shoes, reaching up with a gold heart.
Across ceramic, bronze, textile, crystal and paint, one thing holds: for Hayon, design is storytelling.
"We arrive in the world with a very active imagination and, for some reason, we turn away from that wonderful quality."
— Jaime Hayon (JAIME HAYON)
He never turned away.
THE MOVING ART 🚛🖼️
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