When we initially founded The Unibrow, we asked R & Company’s Evan Snyderman to help us to look at design as a historic, contemporary, and collectible medium. What he told us, and wrote in Issue 01, was about the new movement of what he called “Collectible Design,” and wrote, “When I speak about collectible design, I’m referring specifically to furniture, lighting, and objects created by artists, architects, designers, or craftspeople, objects made with innovation, artistry, and intention, often existing somewhere between utility and sculpture. We’re at a pivotal moment for this field.”
This is evident and at the heart of the new exhibition, The Chair, Collected, opening at the Tribeca gallery on March 6. The show lays the foundation of industrial design, but also an international overview of how the most common of objects, the chair, has been the subject of both designers and fine artists for nearly a century. The show is both about function and expression; you can sit but you can always imagine these as artworks unto themselves.
The chair, as an object, needs to work. That sounds silly, almost mundane, but it does need to function as something where ergonomics and comfort can be considered. And looks. Some of the works in the exhibition, like Poul Kjaerholm’s 1953 design of the Tripod Chair, is so ubiquitous and borrowed that you it almost feels invisible as a functional object. You see it, it is beautiful, but in this context, it retains it’s standing as an art object that works. There are also works like Serban Ionescu’s 2022 work Hollywood #1, a wild reinterpretation of a sitting surface, an art piece in your home but perhaps not where you sit and do your daily writing work.
One of the things Snyderman notes of the works in the show and the chair in general is “Its ubiquity has made it fertile ground for material and formal experimentation, from industrial innovation to unexpected media applications.” When we talk about how to live with art, how art lives in your home, there are more conversations to be had about the objects that you surround yourself with and how one can even sit on works of art. It’s a fun experiment and a movement that is gaining more and more appreciation. Snyderman wrote in Issue 01, “The story of collectible design is still being written—by artists, collectors, curators, and anyone willing to see objects not just as things, but as ideas...”. Have a seat and think on that. —Evan Pricco
