CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/16/2023

Design meets sculpture in 'The Spirit of Chairs'

Featured spreads are from Lars Müller Publishers’ gorgeous clothbound new release The Spirit of Chairs, collecting superb examples of chair design—from to Isamu Noguchi to Gaetano Pesce, Donald Judd to Mary Heilmann—from the world renowned collection of Thierry Barbier-Mueller. Featuring no fewer than 927 reproductions of works by more than 300 visionaries across various disciplines, this is a design-lover’s nirvana—as playful as it is hard-core experimental. “I was initially intrigued by original and occasionally outlandish chairs, prototypes which, in some instances, remained unique pieces, never put into production,” Barbier-Mueller writes. “It goes without saying that at that time, in the 1980s and 1990s, the market wasn’t yet turning artists and designers into superstars. Eventually I realized just how timeless this object, the chair, is—spanning centuries, crossing continents—and how much it had inspired a broad range of designers and artists, styles and cultures. … The ultimate magic of an object by [a true] maker is that it stands alone, requiring no explanation, no special knowledge. A chair is a chair for one and all! Revolutionary, wacky, innovative, humorous, ironic, joyous, elegant, boring, surprising, spare, mysterious, makeshift, cheeky, brutal, sophisticated, practical, impractical or straight-out unusable, the character of each piece is understandable to everyone. No words are needed—even though a title may occasionally add a bit of spice—no mediation is required to borrow a term currently in fashion and fairly irritating. It is an art that is free and that sets us free, encouraging each of us to explore rather than to identify.”