Incollect Magazine - Issue 4

Incollect Magazine 83 2023 Gazelle Dining Chair by Amorph Amorph, Los Angeles The Gazelle Dining Chair in walnut wood and natural stain is a wonderfully organic design that from the back angle looks like a gazelle standing on alert. The nimble, sinuous legs anchoring the chair back converge at bottom into one, heightening a sense of this sculpture as modeled on the fast moving, elegant member of the antelope family. The slender, sleek elongated lines of the back and legs certainly heighten the association. “The Gazelle Chair design challenges the traditional idea of stability of a chair by having 3 legs and with overall an organic shape,” says Amir Habibabadi from Amorph. The chair is made to order of carved wood in the United States and is available in numerous different finishes. Stardust Bench Ensemble by Pia-Maria Raeder Galerie BSL, Paris German artist Pia-Maria Raeder has produced one of the most startlingly innovative seating designs in recent memory with her Stardust Bench Ensemble, a pair of benches with two seats each, encrusted with 23,000 beechwood half “pearls.” Each pearl is individually applied by hand on a waxed concrete structure and finished with a coating of silver, to create a shimmering, sparkling, reflective surface that varies in appearance depending on the angle from which it is viewed. The artist explains her inspiration for the work as a fascination with the wider cosmos. “Just like everyone I am fascinated by the scene of a starry sky. We all instinctively feel the magnetic attraction of these suns’ final splendors, as far as they may be. Living organisms are all made of this stardust that has crossed the universe for billions of years. With Stardust, I want to give my own interpretation of this natural phenomenon.” Each piece is handmade by the artist and is unique. Exclusive to Galerie BSL in Paris, internationally renowned artist Pia-Maria Raeder’s Stardust Bench twinkles and glitters with cosmic reflections in a spectrum of warm tones from brown to pink to golden, to cooler tones of blue, black and silver. Dome-shaped beechwood “pearls” are carved to different dimensions and are painstakingly hand-applied one-by-one by the artist, encrusting the surface and animating the organic form. Inspired by the nimble grace of the gazelle, Los Angeles-based Amorph design atelier created the Gazelle Dining Chair to be perfectly comfortable as well as strikingly elegant from every angle. The seatback is composed of contoured open forms, with rear legs flowing into a gently flared conjoined base, an undulating, organic sculpture that is a work of functional art.