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Chair/Chair by Richard Artschwager, 1987-2003

$21,240
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Description

Red Oak, Cowhide, Formica, Steel.


Edition N°75/100.


Richard Artschwager (1923–2013) was an American artist known for blending the aesthetics and concerns of Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism with wit and precision. Drawing on his early experience running a furniture factory in the 1960s, Artschwager used industrial materials like Formica and everyday forms to question the boundaries between art, design, and utility. His works—often part-sculpture, part-furniture, part-image—explore tensions between the natural and artificial, the real and the represented. Through objects like Chair/Chair, he challenged viewers’ perceptions, turning familiar items into philosophical inquiries about material, function, and meaning.


Chair/Chair is in fact a fully functional chair—it can be sat on. Unlike many of Richard Artschwager’s sculptural works that look like furniture but are deliberately unusable, Chair/Chair plays a more ambiguous game: it functions perfectly well as a chair, but it’s presented and regarded as a sculpture first, which complicates how we’re meant to engage with it.


Artschwager was interested in blurring boundaries between art and utility. He once said, “It’s not a chair. It’s the idea of a chair.” In that spirit, Chair/Chair asks the viewer: Is this furniture, or is this art? The answer can be both. So to clarify: it’s functional physically, but conceptually, its function is complicated. It's this tension that makes the piece so compelling.


The work is held in major museum collections, including the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and is considered a key example of Artschwager’s exploration of function, perception, and the absurd.

Measurements

H99 x W104 x D127 cm

Condition
Pre-owned
Color
Brown
Seller
COUR

COUR represents design-driven objects of singular value. Through concept-driven exhibitions, experimental publications and a constantly evolving collection of design collectibles curated by Milan Henderickx, COUR shapes new design narratives that unfold across multiple periods, genres and media, bridging past and present and seeding new concepts in the continuum of design history.

  • Vintage
  • Industrial

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