Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/65912
Paper chair Mathias Bengtsson It's been a fairly exhilarating decade for Mathias Bengtsson, the Copen- hagen-born, London-based furniture designer who, after several energetic col- laborations in the early-aughts (the collective "Panic" among them), founded his eponymous studio in 2002. In the years since, his chairs, chaises, benches and jewelry (many of which use industrial means in new and elegant ways) have been exhibited at Sotheby's, Phillips de Pury, the Design Museum in London, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and the Röhsska Mu- seum in Gothenburg, which hosted a sizable solo show of his work in 2005. He'll have a major exhibition this fall at the Galerie Maria Wettergren in Paris and, in January, nabbed the coveted Finn Juhl Prize (past recipients include Louise Campbell and Maya Lin) in his native Denmark. Bengtsson pinpoints curiosity and "the need to create" as his all-con- suming driving forces. But given his inventive and unexpectedly domestic riffs on heavy-duty materials such as carbon fiber, aluminum and plywood (his Modular Aluminum Concept couch, for one, comprises 34 pieces of chrome-coated aluminum bound into a sleek ridged bench), it comes as no surprise that technology plays a major role in his practice as well. His most recent endeavor, a new epoxy chair set to debut at Wettergren's Design Miami/Basel booth, is made using rapid prototyping and designed based on the growth principles of human bones. The exterior of the chair is pre-determined, he says, but its actual make- up is composed differently with each individual piece by a computer program designed to "create the cellular configuration that bone tissue might adopt to create a strong, stable construction." The Tripod, 1949, also known as the Chistera, is considered one of Motte's masterpieces. CULTURED 85 COURTESY GALERIE MARIA WETTERGREN