In this playful exhibition fusing art and fashion, Maritta Nurmi puts herself in the vanguard of our times. She borrows the title of this show from Arthur C. Danto, the philosopher and art critic, noted for his pieces in The Nation, the leftish American weekly. It was Danto who questioned where art would go once it lost all relation to narrative. Maritta Nurmi takes this same position: Anything goes.

The artist is already noted for her richly detailed works of silver, aluminum and copper leaf on canvas. In the show Art Vietnam is proud to offer viewers, she continues along this path adding text and textile to accentuate her effervescent surfaces. Freed from the constraints of making “Art” as it is currently conceived, Nurmi explores all sorts of media and objects, elevating the everyday and mundane into what we may call the zone of the sublime.

Large, round aluminum trays used for steaming rice are suddenly transformed into whirlpools of flora and line; small wooden stools, playfully patterned, spring from the floor to the wall, while their corresponding tea tables are transformed into colorful, functional artworks. Stainless steel work tables are essays in structure and line; dragons and Buddhas appear faintly in their mirrored surfaces, transporting the object and the viewer into a fanciful world.

Nota bene, we must add: In the midst of all the playfulness, Nurmi takes her ideas into yet another dimension. Inspired by the colorful textiles of the people of Benin, in West Africa, where she was an artist in residence in 2009, she had fabrics of her artworks made in India and then transformed the fabric into her own eclectic mode of fashion, Couture Adorable de Maritta.

Stripes and circles, angles and lines, color and pattern all collide into a splendid kaleidoscope of fun and frolic, a true testimony to the function of art as art and art as function wherein “anything goes”.