Jorgen Evil Ekvoll and Can Sayinli's hand-woven silk rug -- a design called War, depicting a baby surrounded by bleeding bodies, hand grenades and guns -- sold for $60,000 at the Art Basel Miami Beach exhibition in December.
Dan Golden's wry cartoons of cigarette-smoking canines, psycho-babbling infants and the Red Cross symbol with the tag line "Morphine Is the Best Medicine" on hand-tufted wool sell for $6,750 each at Eccola Imports in L.A.
And at Design Within Reach, the $3,300 Manuscrit Rug reproduces a handwritten Joaquim Ruiz Millet poem, an erotic work whose translation from Catalan might make some shoppers blush.
Pay attention where you're stepping these day. A trend may be underfoot. A new category of high-end contemporary rugs is emerging: graphic illustrations of sex, drugs and other not-so-PG themes rendered by designers who look to the floor as an uncensored canvas.
"It's hard to create difference without being bold," said the London-based Ekvoll, whose provocative War rug was on display in Miami Beach alongside two others: Drugs, which shows spiraling mushrooms, tablets and capsules; and Sex, which features larger-than-life female genitalia. Not to be outdone, the nearby F.A.M.E. Collective gallery space showcased a large floor covering by graffiti artist Mark Dean Veca featuring sexual references interlaced with an apple pie.
New York artist Golden's rug collection is subversive, but in a lighter, comic-strip way. His New Zealand wool rugs include a design showing two smoking mutts loitering on a lawn, next to a sign that reads, "Keep Dogs Off Grass." In another, the line touting morphine is preceded with: "Some one once said laughter is the best medicine -- they're wrong."
"There are drug references and things that are there to shock, but I hope to get across that it's not gratuitous," Golden said. "I think there's something more behind it."
To dress up the wood floor in her San Francisco living room, therapist Maurita Carter bought one of Golden's rugs -- a design that shows a fork in the road and humorous, expletive-laden street signs that can be viewed at www.dangolden.com.
"It's a talk piece for first-time guests," said Carter, who was attracted to the rug's playfulness. "It's edgier than our other furnishings."
Reality TV director Brian Harris Krinsky thought the smoking dogs were funny, so he brought them into his downtown Los Angeles loft. He likes the rug's originality and plans to keep it -- unless, he said, "my cats do something to it."
