DECONSTRUCTION & CHAISE LONGUE 180° - 2025
The exhibition includes ‘Deconstruction,’ a sculpture made from mounting a metal plate at a diagonal slant.
Steel & concrete
Approx. 180 x 270 x 200 h. cm
Stylistically reminiscent of 80s furniture design, the structure seems both rational and practical – perhaps because steel structures tend to give the air of practicality when perforated steel sheets are placed upon them. Yet on closer inspection, the structure has no clear function, serving neither as wall partition nor a table, and may even be said to convey something of the irrational in its construction – both in its relationship with gravity and in proportions that refuse to conform to standards of a 90° rectangle that underlies rational construction.
The second sculpture takes the design icon of early modernism as its referent. The Chaise Longue (Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret & Charlotte Perriand) had gone into production in the thirties, or around the same time one of the most consequential pieces of regulatory legislation for the banking sector had gone into effect in USA (Glass-Steagall) in the year 1933.
The chair’s original semicircle of tubular steel, so typical of the Bauhaus, is simply elongated to form a full circle. One that is perhaps reminiscent of cybernetic feedback – at least to the degree that a circle is essentially a line that bends inward to form a loop. The two sculptures stand next to each other in spatial proximity that is visually similar to how abstract concepts may be entwined in dialectical tension with each other.