Artist:
Nicole Wermers (born 1971 in Emsdetten, Germany; lives and works in London, England).
Materials:
Vintage fur, steel tubing, upholstery, silk, and velvet; variable dimensions.
Description:
“‘Untitled Chairs’ (2014-15), is a series of unique dining chair and fur coat assemblages where the individual garments are seamlessly and permanently sewn around a chair’s form creating an entirely new one. The chairs themselves are Wermer’s adapted versions of a model created for German manufacturer Thonet in 1928 by architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer, twentieth-century ‘design classics’ that are still in production today. The Cesca chairs integrate a cantilevered tubular steel form with a cane or upholstered seat and backrest. These have now been conjoined with women’s furs in various styles and color, whose folds and visual allure boldly disport themselves coupled with additional silk linings and matching iridescent velvet seats, rendering the upright steel frame and cane back support entirely hidden from view. The coats hang as if their owners had left the room, a coded fleeting ritual marking their absence and their ‘ownership’ of the chair and its ‘place’ as one would do in a public space. The works unify their disparate parts into luxurious functional sculptures recalling the work of architecture and design collaborations such those between Eileen Gray and Charlotte Perriand with Le Corbusier or Lilly Reich with Mies van der Rohe, which created innovative interiors employing contrasting materials to great effect and to great acclaim, although until recently mostly for the men, whom, unlike their female counterparts, are tellingly known only by their surnames.”
—David Bussel, “Press Release: Nicole Wermers at Herald St,” Contemporary Art Daily, March 31, 2015.
“Her installation Infrastruktur adopted the glossy aesthetics and materials of modernist design and high fashion, alluding to themes of lifestyle, class, consumption and control. ”
—”Turner Prize 2015 Artists: Nicole Wermers,” Tate, last modified 2015.
