When Mette Bentzen and Lasse Kristensen opened their workshop in Denmark in 2011, their ambition was to make “the perfect of the perfect” freestanding furnishings. The corporate’s early work was purely useful and designed within the Danish fashionable vein, which was solely pure, since that they had each educated and labored for years at Copenhagen’s P. P. Mobler, the store famend for constructing essentially the most difficult of Hans Wegner’s iconic chairs.
However a number of years into their new enterprise, on a go to to Artwork Basel/Miami, the pair noticed a flamboyantly expressive desk by Joseph Walsh of Eire, and the expertise shook one thing unfastened in them. The following desk they designed, with its arched and branching legs, was a turning level for them, a bridge from typical furnishings to one thing extra sculptural. They quickly have been constructing stack-laminated items and carving them in shapes depicting or decoding varieties from nature: melting glaciers, icicles, and stalagmites, the face of the moon.
“Working this fashion,” Bentzen says, “set our work free from mid-century Danish design.” The carving, Kristensen says, which is completed with angle grinders, information and rasps, and numerous hours of hand-sanding with customized sanding blocks, “is impressed by the uncooked great thing about nature but additionally lets us categorical the grain of the wooden. We try for you first to see the form alone. Then whenever you get nearer, you say, ‘Oh, it’s wooden!’ and luxuriate in that.”
Concepts from above
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Lengthy dedicated to expressing carefully noticed melting-ice varieties of their sculpted furnishings, Danish makers—and avid hikers—Bentzen and Kristensen just lately purchased a home in far northern Sweden for less complicated entry to glacial terrain. One other latest buy, a telescope, keys into their ongoing sequence of wall sculptures lit from inside that depict the moon behind a scrim of clouds.
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