...In the exhibtion A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, there is more than A Chair and You can look at them, study them, explore them, converse with them... In the presentation Stühle zum (Be)Sitzen on the first floor landing of the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, there is more than A Chair and You can look at them, study them, explore them, converse with them...
...While the rest of the international design museum community retreat from the warmth of the summer sun, taking shelter in the cool of their depots and archives, Leipzig's Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst are busy preparing for one of its annual highlights: Grassimesse... A craft, applied art and design fair instigated in 1920 which has witnessed, and survived, the highs and lows of the past century in Leipzig and environs...
...In addition the furniture chapter presents, and as one of very, very few works and creatives on show not directly associated with the Bauhauses, and thus an object whose presence is initially very confusing, a Thonet KS 46 by, strongly attributed to, Anton Lorenz, a steel tube cantilever chair that we first became acquainted with in a photo on show at Power Space Violence... A Thonet KS 46 steel tube cantilever chair of which an example, not the one on show in Weimar, but a Thonet KS 46, was part of the furnishing at Berchtesgaden, Hitler's famed and fabled mountain retreat...
..."1 Just one of a great many questions of chairs, seats, sitting and sitters A Chair and You at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig, encourages, empowers, you to reflect upon... A Chair and You is scheduled to run at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Johannisplatz 5–11, 04103 Leipzig until Sunday October 6th...
...After several years of preparation, and a lot of, at times (very) heated, discussion, this past March saw the staging of the inaugural Grassimesse Leipzig in the city's Rathaus... Richard Graul, Director of the Leipzig Kunstgewerbemuseum by way of a response to, an answer to, the increasing concerns amongst many professional creatives regarding the quality of contemporary objects of daily use presented at the bi-annual Leipzig Fair, for all the quality of the novel machine produced goods of contemporary industry, the Grassimesse intends to be not only a platform for presenting the highest quality of contemporary craft, applied art and design, but also to be a platform for exchange and mediation between creatives and industry and commerce, and thereby seeks to help to stimulate an increase in the quality, usefulness, beauty and value for money of the everyday goods of contemporary life...
...Thonet A Michael; A Twist; A Portfolio of Patents According to the Felsbilder of the Nymphs of Loreley, that most important of sources of information of the earliest (hi)story of the contemporary Rheinland, the Thonet arose in the community of Boppard, a community framed on the one side by a series of swinging aqueous curves as the Rhein meanders its way slowly through the metamorphic rock of the Rhenish Massif, and on the other by a range of peaks of that Massif on whose flowing curving sides innumerable wild vines sweep and curve vertically and horizontally... And thus a Boppard that for a great many centuries was essentially cut off from the surrounding communities, and where the Thonet lived a quiet existence fishing, bee-keeping and building chairs defined by their sweeping, curving, swinging, meandering frames whose origins no-one could explain but which had been constructed in Boppard for as long as anyone could remember...
..." The evidence to back up Jochen Voigt's claim can be seen in objects such as, amongst others, Randolf Schott's S 1200 secretary and S 95 conference chair for Thonet, Rüdiger Schaack's Allright cantilever chair and Swing Up office chair for Sedus or Jo Zarth's product and corporate design work for the German razor and shaving accessory manufacturer Mühle...
