Nirvana Chair

Wendell Castle Nirvana Chair

DATES 2007

DIMENSIONS

62 3/8 x 33 5/8 x 33 3/4 in. (158.4 x 85.4 x 85.7 cm)

35 1/2 × 62 × 34 in | 90.2 × 157.5 × 86.4 cm

Materials:  Polychromed gel-coated fiberglass with automobile paint

Wendell Castle, one of America’s most important contemporary furniture makers, has had several distinct stylistic phases in his career. At first he employed both exotic and native American woods to produce furniture characterized by biomorphic forms and attenuated surrealism. By the 1960s, he had begun experimenting with plastic and fiberglass to create seamless organic designs. In the 1980s, he became fascinated with Post-Modernism and produced highly architectural, polychromatic designs. In 2007 he received the Brooklyn Museum/Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award. The Nirvana chair was a gift of the artist in acknowledgment of the Museum’s ongoing commitment to his work. 

Wendell Castle

American, 1932–2018

Wendell Castle is known as the father of art furniture. The artist and designer was a pioneer of a new type of handcrafted and sculptural form, one that blurred the line between art and craft when it emerged in the 1960s. Working in wood, including the technique he developed using stacked laminated wood, or in hand-carved Fiberglass, he creates bold and graceful expressions of pure form, voluminous shapes that reference the body. Along with his work as a sculptor, Castle was an educator, beginning at the School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the early ‘60s. In 2007 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Design from the Brooklyn Museum of Art.