Praying Mantis Chair

$6,000

Description: The Praying Mantis Chair takes its name from the creature it recalls: angular, poised, and alive with tension. The splayed legs and rising back crest form a silhouette that suggests both readiness and restraint, as if the chair were caught between stillness and sudden motion.

Its steel frame, forged and patinated by hand, evokes the exoskeletal strength of the insect—hard, jointed, and tensile. Around this structure, vegetable-tanned leather is wrapped tautly, conforming to the skeletal seat. As the leather stretches and ages, its pale blush tones deepen into warm browns, and the steel form beneath begins to emerge—an evolving skin that records touch, light, and use.

Hand-built in Los Angeles.
Measurements: 33 x 26 x 30 in
Condition: New
Color: Brown/Black
Seller: Joseph Santiago-Dieppa
I came to sculpture and design through painting, carrying with me a deep sensitivity to gesture, surface, and composition. That painterly sensibility stays close as I work in wood, metal, and other raw materials. Each piece feels like a canvas in space, where movement and material spark a kind of conversation. My practice is restless. I am interested in creating forms in which various identities and extremes coexist: dense and spare, industrial and handmade, rigid and relax, systematic and random. I test how far a line can stretch, how a plane might sag or split, how a form can breathe instead of stand frozen. Each project feels like an improvisation, guided by urgency and curiosity. I’m willing to let things feel unresolved or uneasy, trusting that tension to sharpen the work. It comes from a painter’s memory of color and touch — carried forward into three dimensions, always moving, always searching.