A collection from a single owner of more than 200 bold shots of the humble chair will be on display in Switzerland
“For me, a chair is like a sculpture,” said the renowned theater artist Robert Wilson. “I’m not that keen on sitting in a chair, but I enjoy looking at them.”
Wilson was called by the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts (MUDAC) in Lausanne, Switzerland, to showcase collector Thierry Barbier-Mueller’s extensive selection of radical, historically significant chairs from the 1960s to the present.
The exhibition “A chair and you“ appeals to a medium Wilson knows well. as other exhibition currently on show in New York, shows that chairs played a central role in his unconventional theatrical work. The chairs he has arranged for MUDAC range from the lesser known but impactful to the recognized and influential.
Staged in four acts as Wilson might reinterpret a Wagnerian opera, the exhibition encompasses four immersive spaces in which more than 200 iconic chair designs appear as actors in their own scene. He has designed exhibitions in large institutions such as the Louvre in Paris and smaller venues such as New York noguchi Museum, as well as luxury brands such as HermesWilson has long applied his scenographic skills to platforms other than the world’s leading opera houses.
Central to Wilson’s practice is light, a substance that the director applies like paint. “Light isn’t something you do after designing an exhibition; it’s an integral part of the project,” Wilson said. “So we started with the lighting. Light is structural, light is architectural, it is the element that helps us hear and see.”
In some cases, the chairs are displayed in brightly lit jewel cases with organically shaped shaggy carpets. In others, the atmosphere is much moodier. Offset lights are refracted up from the ground or through semi-transparent scrims. The fourth act, Kaleidoscope Space, features maquettes of dazzling designs, such as Philipp Aduatz’s 2011 melting chair to a dramatic, almost trompe-l’oeil effect.
The director is an avid collector himself, with thousands of pieces reflecting a range of cultures, uses and interests that challenge the traditional dichotomies of high and low art. These works often characterize his stage designs. Consisting of iconic pieces like Stefan Wewerka’s distorted one classroom chair from 1971 and Choi Byung-Hoon’s format refusal afterimage Chair from 2001, Barbier-Mueller’s stories are just as varied.
The diverse assemblage sees the chair as much more than just a functional object, but one that can contain meaning, harness the latest in materials research, express social comment and even challenge traditional building styles.
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