architect, artist and furniture designer, born 1928, lives in Magdeburg / Saxony-Anhalt

 

Chairs without seats, crooked chairs, chairs that disappear into the wall, chairs that – because they only consist of one half – do not become whole until set next to a mirror, or chair fragments that lean against one another for support. These are works from the studio of object artist Stefan Wewerka, which propagates the thesis: “One has to have a slant in order to go straight ahead.” The architect and later action artist, designer, jewellery and film maker from Magdeburg began his career in the mid-1950s with the construction of an unusual youth hostel as well as with visions for an “earth architecture”. In the 1970s, when he was closely involved with the Fluxus movement, the independent thinker suddenly came up with his first industrially produced furn i t u re. He found in entrepreneur Axel Bruchhäuser, owner of the Tecta furniture company, a partner who was open to the idea that furn i t u re can be art, with every piece an experiment. Bruchhäuser was also in the position, with his staff, to put even unusual ideas into production. From the beginning of the 1980s – Wewerka had at this point occupied himself with furniture objects for twenty years already - he created for the Westphalian enterprise a highly complex collection, which includes cabinets, tables and chairs as well as dressers, lamps and sofas. In the process he developed his own geometric, asymmetrical formal vocabulary. Within it are combined surprising proportions and references to functionalist Modernism, whether to Mies van der Rohe in the Einschwinger (a three- metre-long steel tube bent into a chair) or to Gio Ponti in the B4 chair made of black-stained ash. High points in Wewerka’s conceptualism are the Cella unit for small apartments and the multiply pivoting Küchenbaum ( Kitchen Tree) all-in-one cooking station. These ensembles are just as sculptural as they are versatile, exemplifying Stefan Wewerka’s about-face from anti-establishment artist to functional consolidator, spanning the astounding arc from constructivism to deconstructivism. With his B1 easychair, the ingenious designer created out of two sawed-up chairs a new model that allows for many different sitting positions.