The North Face teamed up with Alfie Kungu, a painter, to create a capsule collection. In a unique offering unlike anything The North Face has dropped before, the 10-piece unisex range – made up of garments, bags and mules – comes doused in the artist’s signature abstractural art.
The designs draw inspiration from Kungu’s enduring love of the outdoors, nurtured by his upbringing in the hills of Yorkshire. The artist uses a palette of deep purples, cool blues, and earthy greens to reference the wild animals that have always surrounded him. The overlapping prints can be seen as a landscape of rivers and mountains, with twinkling skies if you look closely.
For the new collaboration, Kungu took to both his remote Yorkshire studio and inner-city London space to create the “hundreds upon hundreds of characters, compositions and abstract pieces” that led to his final print. Kungu invited Hypebae to his East-London studio for an exclusive interview. Read more below.
What was the first thing that influenced your decision to pursue art?
Because my dad is a great painter and my mother is very good at painting, I have always been around art. As a child I enjoyed drawing monsters, wild animals, and other creatures. It was a great way to pass the time, and it was something I was familiar with so I kept at it until I realized I had no choice but to stop.
Let us know a bit about your practice and how it has evolved over the years.
I’ve found that I don’t really like to break up my practice into separate things. All of it is interconnected. Relief painting is a technique I have been working on for just over one year. I will take a canvas and cover it with silk. Then, I’ll do the painting onto the silk and take off the canvas from the back and it’s got the bleed through – the relief. You can create beautiful nuances that you wouldn’t be able to paint in. Your mistakes and gaps give the painting more meaning than the painting you did. The bits you don’t paint tell a more interesting story. Although it may seem a little excessive, once you are familiar with something it is like your favorite food. No matter how many times you make it, you still like it.
You have a distinct technique with bold colors and textures. Why should they be an integral part of your work?
One of my favorite things is to experiment with new materials. You want to feel the relationship between texture and color. My work is characterized by an exploration of different materials. This is what motivates me to keep creating. It’s also about pairing colors. It’s fine to have one color. It is the connection between two colors that excites me.
To touch on the importance material, how does your collaboration and working with garments with The North Face compare to the traditional art sheets you make?
In fact, I approached it in the same way. I was thinking about how to translate my idea onto a piece artwork. It was either a bag, a garment, or a pair of mules that I initially overlooked. Just needed to create a piece and translate the elements into colors. Blue is the water, sky and land, and green is the earth and the nature. These few elements enabled me to create my own environment and abstract compositions within the painting. It was a broken down process. I started with the foreground. It’ll be similar to the river. Then it will build back up to the mountains and then the sky. Each color is related to different environments in nature.
Did you have any feelings or emotions you wanted to see in the design?
I enjoy the fact that I can share a passion with others and convey my appreciation for the outdoors and natural world through my practice. They’re seemingly quite separate things – you might be quite outdoorsy, and also make artwork but they come together. It was an exciting experience to create this collection. I love the way it expresses my passion for nature and the outdoors.
Why are you so attracted to the outdoors while working?
I’m always inspired by the outdoors because no matter how familiar you are with somewhere, there’s always something new that you’ll come across and it’s just really important to me to spend time outdoors.
What does the North Face really mean to someone who grew up in the country?
It’s been my favorite outdoor brand since I was a kid. When I was younger, I asked my mom if she could help me get one. The North Face puffer jacket was my go-to for studio work when I arrived at university in Bristol. It was so cold that it was always on. Over the years, it just got more and more paint on and eventually it was covered on the inside and outside – and I still have that jacket. I’d wear it all the time in my studio and people would always say, “Is that a limited edition?” Or, “Is that a collab?” I’d always reply, “one day, one day.” But without realizing, the jacket related to this collaboration. I thought ‘I could do it like this’ and make it part of the story.
Hypebeast is now showing the Alfie Kungu collaboration with The North Face. To shop the pieces featured, head to The North Face’s website now.