Paper Tube Chair 2012

Manfred Kielnhofer made these chairs from paper tubes, sometime in the last few decades, and it's great to see sculpture move into the world of furniture! I love the texture of the paper, the way it catches the light. It reminds me of that balance we always try to strike as artists, between wanting something to be solid, real, present, but also open to change, to the ephemeral. Kielnhofer seems to find a good balance between these two things in these chairs. The larger chair almost looks like it's been built from some ancient ruin, while the smaller one has a kind of fragility. I love the way the cylinders on the larger piece are stacked, almost defying gravity. It's an echo of the stacks of paper in my studio, the way the materials we use to create become things in themselves. It makes me think of Martin Puryear, his way of making monumental work from humble materials, and embracing the kind of ambiguity which invites us to project our own stories and associations onto a piece.