Contemporary artists are known for being relentlessly multi-disciplinary, toggling between sculpture, painting, video, and any other media they can wrap their brains around. Furniture has often been a part of that equation, whether it’s as an element within the work (Robert Rauschenberg conscripting a battered chair for a combine) or the work itself (Donald Judd’s barebones tables, shelves, and desks; Jim Drain’s brightly colored benches, recently spotted at the Dallas Art Fair).
A number of artists currently showing in New York are flirting with their inner interior decorator. At Andrew Kreps through May 10, you can see a series of Judd-simple wooden viewing benches by Marc Camille Chaimowicz, as well as a desk dedicated to Gustave Flaubert, its legs resembling two bulbous quotation marks. At the Whitney Biennial, and at the just-closed Broadway 1602 show, Paul P. presents wooden chairs and seats that are simultaneously skeletal and ornate. At Gladstone Gallery, a concrete-block bench theoretically provides a place to sit and admire monumental photo-wallpaper featuring Sarah Lucas chomping down on a banana. That phallically fixated exhibition is on view through April 26; Lucas also spotlighted more concrete-and-MDF furniture earlier this month with Sadie Coles HQ at the Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan. Julian Hoeber adds a cherry wood, white oak, epoxy, and suede chair he designed to a two-person back-gallery exhibition at Zach Feuer, up through May 3. (You might also recall fawning over Hoeber’s “Endless Chair (Bench)” at the since-shuttered Harris Lieberman gallery’s 2012 Frieze booth.)
And last but not least, it’s good to see that artists aren’t always taking a human-centric view when it comes to furniture. Friedrich Kunath’s excellent, multi-faceted exhibition at Andrea Rosen (on view through April 26) includes a series of sculptures composed of “cat towers,” covered in Persian rugs and decorated with faux-watermelons.
