Moderne Gallery is pleased to present a selection of chairs by renowned, iconoclastic American Studio Craft designer Garry Knox Bennett.
Riffing on the design language of iconic chairs, visual vocabulary, and aesthetic culture, Knox Bennett’s tongue-in-cheek humor and chameleonic design and construction abilities are on full display within this selection of chairs.
Six of the eight chairs featured below are part of Knox Bennett’s “GR Series”, which is comprised of humorous riffs on Gerrit Rietveld’s iconic Z Chair design.
On the GR Series, Knox Bennett noted:
“I’ve always looked at [Gerrit Rietveld’s 1934 Zig-Zag Chair] as kind of a joke. I thought, “What a dumb chair this is!” And when I made the first, the ladder-back chair, which started out as kind of tongue-in-cheek, I sat in it, and it was a surprisingly comfortable little chair! I mean it works really well. You can get your feet behind it, when you tuck your feet under yourself; there’s no stretcher that gets in the way. It’s a good height: 18 inches, pretty standard. And it’s got some spring to it; it’s got a little limber to it. So then I have to admit, I actually fell in love with the model. From then on, I was fairly serious. Obviously I’m using puns in a lot of the titles, or a lot of visuals, but I got pretty serious about it.
It’s such a simple form that it allows itself a lot of manipulation. It’s an easy form to build off visually and physically: color, or what you can stick on it, like the wings or the ladder, or the Mackintosh high back. If you want, make it into an armchair!” (Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker. Bellevue Arts Museum, 2006, p. 77-78)
May 29, 2026 – TBD
