HOLES CHAIR

Designer

Gijs Bakker

Circa

1989

Edition

Ed. of 50 | Numbered and Signed by the Artist

Description

The Holes Collection by Gijs Bakker was informed and originally incepted in 1989 as a project commissioned for the POI (Product of Imagination) Foundation’s ‘Chair Sweet Chair’ exhibition. The institution selected design artists to revisit an existing chair design. Bakker subsequently designed a wide range of products with this thesis in mind.

Beginning with a simple, unvarnished chair in maple wood, on four straight legs, Bakker lightened the piece both literally and visually through the application of ‘holes’ that reduced the weight of the chair by almost a third. This decoration has a regularity dictated by function. The bigger the demands on the construction of the chair, the smaller the holes became on the piece. All pieces are manufactured at the designer’s long-time collaborators’ workshops in the Netherlands.

The Chair with Holes belongs to significant private and institutional collections around the world including the Rotterdam’s Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, the Centraal Museum (Utrecht, NL), as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art Permanent Collections (Courtesy of Helen Drutt: Philadelphia)

Materials

Maple Wood

Dimensions

D 17.3 x W 16.9 x H 30.7 in
D 43.9 x W 43 x H 78 cm

Lead Time

Upon Request

Price

Upon Request

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Gijs Bakker

Born 1942 in Amersfoort, Netherlands, Gijs Bakker was trained as a jewelry craftsman and industrial designer at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and the Konstfackskolan in Stockholm, Sweden.

Today, Bakker's body of work includes jewelry, furniture, Objets d’Art, architectural installations, public spaces and exhibition designs. He co-founded the now-famous Dutch collective Droog Design in 1993 and Chi ha paura...? (Italian for "Who is afraid of...?") in 1996, a foundation aimed at expanding the understanding of jewelry beyond the frame of decorative accessories.

A revered teacher, lecturer, and consultant, Bakker heads the Masters Program at the Design Academy Eindhoven. He is highly regarded as one of Modern Dutch Design’s most influential artists and thought-leaders.

His work has been actively collected by internationally acclaimed museums including The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, H.W.D. Collection, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In 2005 he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition (and accompanying monograph) "Gijs Bakker and Jewelry," which traveled from Stedelijk Museum s'-Hertogenbosch to museums around the world, and his work has been published in numerous books and journals.