uma cadeira é uma cadeira é uma cadeira: Organized by Nessia Leonzini and Livia Debbane

A chair is a chair is a chair,

and how much difference there is in a single idea!

A typology consisting of a horizontal support detached from the floor and underpinned by feet, so that one’s legs can rest with the body in a seated position. Chairs and benches have legs that momentarily replace those of humans. Some chairs have arms, which also provide solace and rest. And they have backs, from where the word backrest comes from. Legs, feet, arms, back, seat: the chair is the image of a sitting person. The familiarity of its sculptural form lends it an enduring, fascinating appeal to artists.

This exhibition features some fifty works – chairs, armchairs, benches, and stools – by 51 contemporary and modern artists. Many have been specially created and have never been shown before. Although most can be used and adhere to a few inescapable structural guidelines, these artists’ creations stray from the requirements of design. Whereas the industrial designer typically must consider questions such as mass production or ergonomics, artists can venture into materials and techniques with spontaneity, commenting on social, political, technological, and cultural dynamics.

Archaeological stones attest to the fact that seats have been among us ever since the Neolithic age, at the transition from nomadism to early settlements. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture our ancestors finding rest on rocks or tree trunks, as one is reminded by Amelia Toledo’s and Edgard de Souza’s stools or Marcius Galan’s bench made of tied-up bundles of restless branches, Tiago Mestre’s palm tree trunk shape, or Makaulaka Mehinaku’s tortoise, in which the raw wood hints at the animal’s contours.

In Brazil, everyday seating stools, popular and nondescript – from construction workers, farm hands, street vendors –, conceived with simplicity from found materials, inspire Rivane Neuenschwander, Nicolás Bacal, Keila Alaver, Campana, and Mônica Ventura, who created hers alongside her father, the mason Osvaldo Costa. José Bento turns his stool into a counter with elements from a samba circle like cachaça and tambourines. Jaime Lauriano’s apoti stool has a ritualistic function: its alguidar (earthenware bowl used in Afro-Brazilian religions) is filled with Portuguese stones.

Marcos Chaves rescued his chair from a Rio sidewalk, when its back made from reclaimed wood slats, from a Rio sidewalk – a ready made. With elements also found in the streets, Alexandre da Cunha and Rafael Triboli create a loveseat that paves the way for dimly lit conversations. In Entre o Céu e a Terra (Between Heaven and Earth), Ernesto Neto turns his peroba-rosa wood bench into a space for an emotional liaison, a romance framed by the crochet rope that dangles from above. Titled Juntes (Together), Iván Argote’s bench, equipped with a scooter suspension, encourages agreement among its occupants: it functions like a seesaw or a park bench for conversation, sitting, napping, and ultimately, being together.

Benches and chairs can be symbols of hierarchy and power. Just look at the term chairman, literally the man in the chair. The thrones of pharaohs, emperors, kings, and tribal chiefs resonate in the chair created by Seu Fernando da Ilha do Ferro, its majesty implied by an elevated seat and backrest. The same lofty approach has bred wide armchairs like the ones Flávio de Carvalho designed for Fazenda Capuava or the rocking chair by Mexican artist Jorge Pardo, which is carved with an excerpt from Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre.

Rirkrit Tiravanija claims the chair as an instrument of rest rather than labor by inscribing on its back “do not ever work.” The form devised by Lucas Simões finds itself in a “state of rest” and is named Dormente (Dormant), in reference to the Aristotelian notion of potency.

An empty chair is the representation of a body that is absent. We envision people and characters in Ana Mazzei’s Romana, Carlos Bunga’s Silla Castigada, and Brian Griffiths’ Arm. Is there a more poignant absence than that of the pair of armchairs Maria Thereza Alves created after the passing of her husband, the artist Jimmie Durham (continued life 1800-2022)? With void in mind, Raphaela Melsohn called hers o vazio se preenche (the emptiness fills itself).

There are indications of bodily encounters, as in avaf’s collaboration with Yuli Yamagata. The triple chair by the collective Opavivará! is an invitation to social interaction, an allegory for Brazilian beach friendships that revamps the popular aluminum folding chairs with nylon webbing. In Detanico Lain and Rochelle Costi beach chairs, time goes by languidly: one has clock hands embroidered on it, and the other is encircled by a small landscape of plants.

Daniel Albuquerque’s Móvel is a combination of his go-to material, knitting, and futon upholstery. When extended out, it takes on shapes that run from a chaise to a mat. Sonia Gomes, ditto: she applies the tactile, sensual media of fabric, lace, string, and tie-ups onto the hard, dry surface of the four-legged wooden stool, the same vernacular kind that inspires Marepe. With the unique humor that permeates his work, the Bahia artist carved out the bench after the shape of a champagne bottle muselet.

Efrain Almeida sculpts goat feet onto his chair and makes the seat out of the hide, a look traditionally found in the northeastern states of Brazil e. Vivian Caccuri’s chair unveils a stringed musical instrument. Into the four corners of his Bocada bench, Mano Penalva incorporated crochet billiard pockets – inside which an iPhone or small items may be stored. Jarbas Lopes’ cardboard stool is filled with old documents, expired contracts, random papers – the stuff and currency traditionally kept in the bank (in Portuguese, both bank and stool carry the same word, “banco”, the pun here is lost). A work of art whose name is “you can sit”; i.e., sit on a pile of money. 

The benches by Daniel Senise, Gabriel Orozco, and Marcelo Pacheco are rooted in modern language, with details pertaining to each of their poetics; Senise, for one, employs wooden parquet flooring taken from a late 1950s Franz Heep-designed building.

What artist’s studio doesn’t have a chair in it? How many times haven’t they been central to a piece of work? Edgar Degas portrayed an empty chair with its back to us. Van Gogh painted his as a still life, a pipe laying on the woven straw. Joseph Beuys made it ephemeral, out of fat, as did Adriana Varejão, out of dried meat. Joseph Kosuth went from object to representation to concept in his classic One and Three Chairs. Andy Warhol’s electric chair gives people goosebumps, 60 years later.¹

The proposals in this exhibit are just a sampling of a vast field.² Artists who also made a profession out of design – like Abraham Palatnik and Geraldo de Barros – have drawn up at least a dozen of chairs, a sign that the challenge is never over (a famous portrait of Lygia Clark shows her seating in Palatnik’s chair featured here; Barros' armchair is a prototype).

A chair is a chair, never “the” chair. The Realm of Ideas is a good place for a chair that consists of nothing, like the images – indelible in our collective memory – of astronauts “sitting” on their bodies, floating in outer space, gravity-free. Marcel Breuer, in designing seats stripped down to the bare minimum in his Bauhaus experiments³, said, ideally so: “In the end, we will sit on resilient air columns.”

– Nessia Leonzini and Livia Debbane

–
¹ Edgar Degas, Le Fauteuil, 1860; Vincent Van Gogh, Chair, 1988; Joseph Beuys, Fat Chair, 1964; Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965; Andy Warhol, Electric Chair, 1971
² The Instagram profile @art_as_chairs is a great example.
³ Around that time, Breuer was developing, at Bauhaus Dessau, his first cantilevered tubular steel chairs. The quote is featured in the poster for a film produced by Breuer (bauhaus film: five years long) published in the 1926 bauhaus journal: “every day we are getting better. in the end we will sit on resilient air columns”.

Artists' List:

Abraham Palatnik

Adriana Varejão

Alexandre da Cunha + Rafael Triboli

Amelia Toledo

Ana Mazzei

Andréa Hygino

assume vivid astro focus

Brian Griffiths

Campana

Carlos Bunga

Christopher Chiappa

Daniel Albuquerque

Daniel Senise

Detanico Lain

Edgard de Souza

Efrain Almeida

Ernesto Neto

Seu Fernando da Ilha do Ferro

Flávio de Carvalho

Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Sierra

Geraldo de Barros

Gilson Rikbaktsa

Goran Petercol

Iván Argote

Jaime Lauriano

Jarbas Lopes

Jimmie Durham

Jorge Pardo

José Bento

Karl Holmqvist

Keila Alaver

Kokoró Suyá

Lucas Simões

Makaulaka Mehinaku

Mano Penalva

Marcelo Pacheco

Marcius Galan

Marcos Chaves

Marepe

Maria Thereza Alves

Mônica Ventura + Osvaldo Costa

Nicolás Bacal

Opavivará

Raphaela Melsohn

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Rivane Neuenschwander

Rochelle Costi

Sonia Gomes

Tiago Mestre

Vivian Caccuri + Paulo Nenflidio

Yuli Yamagata