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Sitting on the Art

Given its intimacy with the body and deep play on form and function, furniture is a ripely ambiguous artform of its own

Think of Salvador Dalí’s Mae West lips sofa and his lobster telephones, created in the 1930s for his patron Edward James; Méret Oppenheim’s Object(1936), known in English as ‘Breakfast in Fur’; or Dorothea Tanning’s series Primitive Seating(1982) – animal-print covered chairs, complete with tails! He once told The New York Times: ‘I thought of the work as sculpture, not furniture,’ adding: ‘The fact that it was useful didn’t add anything to it, for me.’ Eschewing conventional furniture-building methods, such as joinery, his pieces were created from simple hand drawings using a chainsaw and robot to carve large blocks of laminated wood. They were inspired by Brazil’s own characterful modernist design movement, headed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer, but also by a playfulness and chaotic openness to different influences, materials and techniques arising from their upbringing in the countryside near São Paulo.

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