Formless Furniture

Since the 1960s contemporary artists have broken open and redefined the traditional relationship of form and material with the experimental and often unshapely looking use of the widest range of materials.

The exhibition "Formless Furniture" is showing for the first time that the maxim "form follows material" has also been, and still is, applied to the design of seating furniture: until today, designers have playfully opposed "good form" and the marketing of conformist lifestyles.

In the 1960s furniture between design and sculpture stood for a new social consciousness and not least for a more liberated political viewpoint, as demonstrated by the "Sacco" by the designer trio Gatti, Paulini and Teodoro, and Roger Dean's "Sea Urchin". As the expression of a new feeling for life, among other things, they freed us from the constraint of a correct seating posture. Today designers such as Ron Arad, Karim Rashid and Tom Dixon deal just as experimentally as imaginatively with formlessness.