A Chair and You

The mudac is honoured to host one of the largest private collec­tions of artist, designer and archi­tect chairs in the world. This collec­tion, initi­ated in the 1990s, is full of original seat­ing designs and its owner, Thierry Barbier-Mueller, has taken the step of present­ing it to the public after more than 20 years of confid­en­tial passion.

The vari­ations and tempos have captiv­ated Thierry Barbier-Mueller’s atten­tion for this evid­ent and neces­sary func­tional object. Faced with such a rich and diver­si­fied corpus, and in order to give each chair its own specificity, famous Amer­ican director Robert Wilson was asked to design immers­ive and excep­tional sceno­graphy, borrowed from the reper­toire of perform­ing arts. Through him, the mudac exhib­i­tion reads like an immense opera in several scenes. The semantic vocab­u­lary shifts, the produ­cer in the person of the collector makes the corpus avail­able, and the director makes a selec­tion and directs the actors/chairs in stage sets and atmo­spheres where sound and light amplify the dram­at­urgy of the narrat­ive. mudac thus gets to offer a brand-new piece of theatre with its first major exhib­i­tion on its 1500 m2 stage, in the heart of the Plate­forme 10 arts district.

A Chair and You presents this object in four acts in scenic situ­ations that reveal the history of design from the 1960s to the present day.

To under­line the sculp­tural char­ac­ter of the elements of the Thierry Barbier-Mueller collec­tion, the great Amer­ican director and artist Robert Wilson was entrus­ted with the sceno­graphy. This excep­tional sceno­graphy plunges the public into immers­ive worlds where the chairs are treated as the prot­ag­on­ists of a perform­ing arts show. Sound, light and sets provide a unique way to discover the iconic design object that is the chair and its many vari­ations.

In the 1990s, Thierry Barbier-Mueller was fascin­ated by the creativ­ity, fresh­ness and tremend­ous explo­sion of spon­taneity of design­ers such as Ron Arad, Tom Dixon and André Dubreuil. His acquis­i­tions grew spon­tan­eously as he met and discovered new design­ers until they became a fully-fledged collec­tion of more than six hundred and fifty chairs from the 1960s to the present day. The collec­tion includes works by inter­na­tional design­ers such as Ettore Sott­sass, Pol Quadens, Shiro Kuramata and Maarten Baas, as well as visual artists such as Donald Judd, Niki de Saint Phalle, Lawrence Weiner and Franz West.
Consist­ing of about two-thirds unique pieces, proto­types or works from small, limited editions, the collec­tion reflects this interest in atyp­ical objects, outside the usual niches of indus­trial design. Barbier-Mueller is above all fascin­ated in the object itself, its unique­ness and plas­ti­city, the humour it evokes or its mater­i­al­ity.