A chair and you. Exhibition at the Mudac in Lausanne – ndion
A chair is a chair is a chair is a chair? no way. It is no coincidence that designing a chair is considered a special challenge among designers. Anyone who would like to see how different chairs can be designed will have the opportunity to do so from October 28 to February 5, 2023 in the newly opened mudac in Lausanne. Then under the title “A Chair and You” One of the world’s largest private collections of chairs on display. Since the late 1990s, Thierry Barbier-Mueller has been putting together the collection, presented for the first time in public, of chairs designed by artists, designers and architects. He is the youngest of Monique and Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller’s three sons and is Managing Director of the Société Privée de Gérance. (Even his grandfather Josef Mueller and his sister Gertrud Dübi-Müller, a muse of Ferdinand Hodler, built up an important collection with works by Ferdinand Hodler, Cuno Amiet, Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne, some of which is on display in the Kunstmuseum Solothurn The Musée Barbier-Mueller in Geneva also has works of art from cultures from all over the world.)
Fascinated by the creativity, the freshness and the spontaneity of designers like Ron Arad, Tom Dixon or André Dubreuil, according to the mudac, the collector kept buying new pieces, until finally a collection with more than 650 chairs from the 1960s to the present day the present has arisen. The quality of this ensemble is unique and goes far beyond the usual chair typology: “Innovative research and formal concepts, unusual combinations of experimental materials, the play with standards and functions characterize this extensive collection.”
About two-thirds of the collection consists of one-offs, prototypes or works from small, limited editions and includes works by designers such as Ettore Sottsass, Pol Quadens, Shiro Kuramata and Maarten Baas as well as artists such as Donald Judd, Niki de Saint Phalle and Lawrence Weiner and Franz West. With their forms and materials, the objects illustrated a conceptual, experimental work on the border to art and sculpture. According to the announcement, it is above all the object itself that captivates the collector, “its uniqueness, its plasticity, the humor that is shown in it, or its materiality”.
In order to take account of the diversity and the special nature of the objects in the presentation as well, the renowned American artist and director Robert Wilson was commissioned to design a scenography that uses the repertoire of the performing arts. Wilson immerses the audience in immersive worlds in which the chairs are treated like protagonists in a theatrical performance. Sound, light and backdrops are intended to create a unique atmosphere in which “the iconic design object chair and its numerous variations” can be discovered in an unusual way. As in an opera, the various “chair actors” would be staged in four acts against different backdrops and in scenic atmospheres.
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