Furniture Room / 2024
Paweł Grunert (born in 1965) is a designer, creator of artistic furniture and sculptor. The artist studied in the Furniture Studio at the Faculty of Interior Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he received a diploma in 1990 for his work, My Chairs. He is fascinated by the idea and form of seating – designing chairs and armchairs has been the main pursuit of his work for over thirty years. For Grunert, furniture has a symbolic function. It can be seen as expressive forms that surround us throughout our lives and on which we leave our marks.
The objects that have made up the titular Furniture Room over the years are constructions combining features of design, sculpture and spatial arrangements. They are created from natural materials such as branches, hay and wicker, as well as from glass, silicone, plastic or recycled metals. What they have in common is the particular imagination with which they were designed. Each of Grunert's creations is a unique art object.
Grunert's furniture-sculptures have a touch of madness, a twisted joke, a slight provocation and often bring to mind fantasies straight out of Alice in Wonderland. A brush-chair, a nest-chair, a hanger-chair and an armchair with bundles of wicker sprouting out of it, as if the seating was still growing upward. “I dream of fields sown with chairs that grow like grapevines in France,” – Grunert said, as a set of ivy-covered chairs had already been planted in his garden. When designing, an artist always starts from the simplest form, from an abstract shape, and then lets his imagination run wild. However, this approach does not make his furniture lose its functionality.
The exhibition Furniture Room / 2024 is an opportunity to see rarely presented works by Pawel Grunert, made over the course of several years: chairs hanging on the wall like hangers, a shroud-chair, a seat made of hay and empty plastic water bottles attached to a steel frame.
