Although born in the Swabian city of Metzingen, Oliver
Holy has been living in Munich for around 25 years and has compiled
a small tour through his adopted city. He takes you to places that are
representative of the city to him and that he likes to share with others.
You get to know him well along the way, although – or especially
because – neither furniture stores nor big art museums are on the list.
“Why should I look at the one hundredth chair? Or the one hundredth
Pollock, Warhol, Chamberlain? They’re all beautiful, but I won’t discover
anything new,” he says. “And I always need something new.” So instead: a
bar, a watch shop, a pastry shop – and the “Espace Louis Vuitton”, which
is still an insider tip, although it opened in 2014. “Hardly anybody knows
about it,” Oliver Holy says. His mother pointed it out to him, and “she
has a good sense for such art projects.” Since then, he hasn’t missed a
single exhibition.
He loves contemporary art and has been casually collecting it
ever since he wished for his first painting at the age of 18. He likes to
visit galleries – in Germany, the United States, Argentina or wherever
his many travels may take him. He also enjoys browsing through auction
catalogues; however, he does not become engrossed in them but simply
enjoys browsing through the pages. This opens the eyes and releases
energies that benefit the ClassiCon collection. He discovered Victoria
Wilmotte’s “Pli Table” with its base made of folded, high-gloss polished
stainless steel that looks like glass, for example, in an art magazine. The
French designer usually works in the field of tension between sculpture
and design and exhibits her designs in galleries. Oliver Holy went to see
her and convinced her to develop the “Pli Table” for series production
with him.
This is a continuous pattern. Instead of “looking through the
furniture glasses”, as Oliver Holy puts it, with his unerring instinct for
quality, he collects impressions wherever creativity and craftsmanship
produce something special. It might be an Indian saddle blanket,
hand-woven of dyed indigo around 1870 and incredibly soft, or a pair
of elephants made of Nymphenburg porcelain (“I circled around them
so many times until my girlfriend finally understood: I wanted to have
them.”), Brutalist architecture or merely an invitation card that has a
particularly beautiful design, which he then pins on his cabinet at the
office. Some of these things he affords, some he only touches (“I’m a truly
extreme haptic.”) and everything piles up in his mind to form a fertile
mound upon which his intuition flourishes.
“I do what I like,” says Oliver Holy. “We know the saying ‘self-
praise stinks’ but I believe that I can presage sooner than others what will
be interesting for the market.” Therefore, ClassiCon only realises designs
that almost nobody else would dare tackle. He pushed through with the
“Bell Table”, for example, after seeing a prototype pictured in an English
language Wallpaper magazine, although it posed major production
challenges with its coloured glass base and brass funnel, and it really did
not fit in with the portfolio at the time. Today, the table can rightly be
called a modern classic – and it’s also a bestseller.
