Garry Knox Bennett: 'Call Me Chairmaker' at Bellevue Arts Museum

Monday, 17 July 2006 12:41

Bellevue, WA - The Bellevue Arts Museum presents the exhibition Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker sponsored by Microsoft Corporation, featuring 52 one-of-a-kind sculp tural chairs created by Garry Knox Bennett, one of the foremost contemporary studio furniture makers in America.  Inspired by well-known furniture designers and architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, George Nakashima and Gerrit Rietveld, Bennett’s wit and imagination comes to life with such chairs as the “Great Granny Rietveld” and “Wiggle Wright”.  By using bold new forms and constantly expanding traditional boundaries, Bennett makes furniture a form of art.  Each chair incorporates precious materials such as rosewood and yellow satinwood with unconventional materials including plywood, aluminum, brass, plastic and paint.

“I prefer to work in series; benches, tables, clocks, lamps and at present time, chairs,” says Bennett, who has been focused on creating chairs since 2003.  “By working this way it allows me to complete one piece, select successful elements and re-invent or extrapolate on issues that come up which I feel can be more successfully resolved.  Often one design will suggest another avenue or challenge to explore and succession becomes very exciting.”

Most of the chairs in the exhibit are functional; however, several operate more as symbols than actual seats.  Comfort would be impossible; sitting down is even a stretch. All 52 chairs are sculptural in quality and each one will awaken a different emotion for the viewer.  One example of this is Bennett’s “Great Granny Rietveld,” a creative take-off on the 1934 “ZigZag Chair” designed and built by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld. Bennett’s version does the unthinkable by design standards, wrapping a retro delicate floral-pattern upholstery around an ultra modern hard-edge functionalist design.  Another homage to Rietveld is the “Wing Chair”, where Bennett has added metallic wings as a pun on the classic colonial wing-back chair, modernism meets colonial Williamsburg.