By Catherine Fox

For the AJC

Odds are that most viewers will find the objects in the High Museum’s “European Design 1985-2005” simultaneously familiar and strange.

● Dennis Santachiara’s Cirro hanging light is a pillowy cumulus cloud that changes its shape and moves with the air currents.

● Philippe Starck’s steel and brass colander is so elegant that it might be more at home in the drawing room than the kitchen.

● Tord Boontje’s chair, draped in swathes of red chiffon ornamented with delicate sprays of cut-metal posies, is the belle of the ball or of the bordello, more sculpture than seating.

These designers reinterpret utilitarian objects in ways that upend expectations and delight the senses. They borrow cutting-edge technologies and find new uses for industrial plastics, feathers, fire and found objects. They challenge conventions of stability, function and comfort.

Their story, however, is not the only one in recent design. R. Craig Miller, curator of design arts at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, documents equally strong countervailing trends in his sweeping survey, the first in-depth look at the period.

● Antonio Citterio’s elegant modernist storage unit emphasize clean lines and sophisticated proportions.

● Monika Mulder’s watering can for IKEA embodies utilitarian chic.

● Hella Jongerius decorates earthenware with sincerely pretty floral patterns.

All of the artists are steeped in the history of art and design, whether they tweak, send up or pay homage. The entry gallery alone goes from Antonio Gaudi — Joris Laarman’s Bone Lounge chair recalls the Spanish architect’s take on art nouveau — to Frank Gehry, whose sinuous cardboard chairs Ron Arad recalls in his ribbonlike stainless steel version.

Designers mine just about every art movement of the 20th century. The inflatable nylon Airbag Chair by Snowcrash, a Finnish firm, brings to mind Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures. Wieki Somers riffs on Surrealist Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup in her ceramic version, which resembles a rodent skull and comes with a fur tea cozy.

Theo Remy, one of a slew of talented Dutch designers who dominate the show (aside from the unsinkable Frenchman Philippe Starck), is a witty conceptual artist-designer. He deconstructs familiar objects, experiments with sustainability and muses about the relationship of furniture to memory in two pieces on view: a chair made of recycled clothing and a chest made of old drawers lassoed into a precarious assemblage by a strap.

As a whole, the designers seem less interested in making lives run smoothly than in enriching them with visual pleasure, at least in this show’s abridged version. Dispensing Windex from one of the colorful Murano blown-glass bottles on view might take the drudgery out of cleaning the mirrors.

But sometimes that approach devolves into one-line jokes or over-thought concepts such as Richard Hutten’s cross-shaped table and bench, which is supposed to be a commentary on corruption in the Catholic Church. Huh?

Curator Miller’s survey vividly conveys the period’s fertility and pace. Ideas form, take flight and fade like shooting stars before you can even get whiplash.

He doesn’t succeed quite as well in corralling work by 117 designers from 14 countries into a coherent whole, not to mention into the linear experience of an exhibition.

Although arranging the furniture in clusters of similar aesthetic thinking (neo pop, for example) is helpful, the terms and sheer number of stylistic subsets can be confusing. Perhaps his structuring devices worked better in the show’s original incarnation, which used color and props to distinguish each section. Perhaps the task is impossible.

The good news is you don’t need them to get the big picture and enjoy individual objects in this delightful and thought-provoking exhibition.

Catherine Fox is chief visual arts critic at ArtsCriticATL.com