Wright Auction

RO/LU is a studio based in St Paul, MN. Founded as a landscape office in 2003 by Matt Olson and Mike Brady, an “open practice” was adopted in 2005 which allowed the work to sprawl and their production now extends to furniture, performance, fashion, curatorial projects and more.

The studio has exhibited work at the Swiss Institute in NYC, the Padiglione Arte Contemporanea in Milan, and at Art Basel /Design Miami, while also completing several large scale residential landscape projects, including a complete redesign of Ralph Rapson’s ‘William Shephard House’ in St Paul’s University Grove neighborhood. Their work has also been shown at Art In General, MoMA PS1, Phillips de Pury, Wright 21, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The studio has completed commissions for PIN-UP Magazine and MONOPOL Berlin and has been featured in publications including The New York Times, the WSJ Magazine, Wallpaper, Surface, Bad Day Magazine, Dwell, Details and GQ.

Their work is part the permanent collection at the Walker Art Center and lives in many amazing private collections.

If asked to select one word to describe Patrick, I would resist and pick two. The first would be curiosity — a fundamental essential, to stimulate inquiry and rigour in all things, both great and small, of any era or region, type or surface. Even the most fleeting survey of this selection for sale is a celebration of innovation and of inspiration — an unerring eye for the unusually exceptional, or perhaps the exceptionally unusual. The chances are, that these are indeed discoveries that you have not yet realised that you needed to make. 

Mentor, would be my second word. If artefacts and objects articulate visual, cultural and historic language, then the fluency of skillful mentorship — to guide, nurture, describe and explain — releases the eloquence of murmuring histories. In this capacity Patrick is that most earnest and sincere of excellent narrators. If ever I had friends, clients or colleagues visiting New York looking for unusual inspiration, there was always the certainty that Patrick’s venues would offer them a glimpse of the hitherto unseen or the unusually seductive, always with the reassurance of the most fascinating story waiting to be told.