Mutilation as Art: 13 Strange Chairs by Matylda Krzykowski
It may not be enough to say these simple and innocent-looking wooden chairs have been tortured … they have been battered, beaten, hammered, hung, smeared, spattered, shot, tarred and feathered, chained to the ground, burned at the stake and have even gone missing entirely. The result? A collection of rather strange chairs designed with the approach of a serial killer.
The survivors featured in this extraordinary furniture art exhibit are horribly scarred and crippled, forever maimed from their ordeals. Each started as a simple spruce wood seat, but each perished in a different way – done in by contemporary shotgun blasts or hung from a traditional noose.
Modus Operandi seems a suitable enough name for this unique art furniture series from Polish designer Matylda Krzykowski. Each destruction fits a profile, each broken-down chair tells a tale. That there are thirteen unfortunate victims is also certainly no accident.
“A chair, in most contexts, is a functional object of utility, commonly used to sit on. Yet, Matylda distorts and extracts the functionality through her ‘modus operandi’, exerting and gaining dominance over the chairs, transforming them into her conceptual pieces.”
About the artist
“Matylda Krzykowski works with space: objects within space and ideas outside of space. Her work has pulled peripheral threads into the centre, and has cast new light on ideas at the centre of the discourses she nourishes. Although these discourses cannot be reduced to conventional spheres of operation, they could broadly be identified as curation, design, architecture, art and performance. Krzykowski seeks to instigate conversations, works to maintain their energy, and thereby affects results. These results are almost always entirely born from intense and generous collaboration. Her work has resonated globally. Krzykowski is organically interdisciplinary. (It’s a way of doing, rather than a way of thinking.)
The tools she deploys include, but are not limited to: speech, instant messaging, archiving [see: Online Depot], art direction, theatre and performance [see: Design Date], scenography and choreography [see: Total Space], reportage [see: Things Might] and digital space treated as physical space [see: Desktop Exhibition]. The communication vehicles she employs include the exhibition, the intervention, the editorial, the public talk, and Instagram, to name a few. Krzykowski travels widely to develop formats, participate in juries, to give lectures, develop exhibitions, and to conceive and deliver workshops in the cultural field. Wherever she may be, she sees the visible and reformats the unseen.”