Soft Baroque
Soft Baroque
Parque del Carmen
2025
The dancing furniture series animates ordinary objects using a mechanism of moving parallel planes. When seated on these pieces, we’re encouraged to manually rotate them, creating a surreal combination between an optical illusion and unusual ergonomic sensation.
Today, our objects are expected to do more, whether in their functionality, higher performance in increasingly niche areas, online presentation or the psychological signals they send before purchase. The dancing furniture is a full embrace of this idea object performance, it dances with you or for you, depending on the way you look at it. It is visually ‘satisfying’ in the online sense, its movement stimulates a slight distortion of reality, a gimmick that arouses us for a brief second. However, when we dance ‘with’ the bench, sit on it and rotate, it is a mediative and soothing experience, like a rocking chair or hammock, it is a lasting intimate feeling that can be shared with another.
With the collaboration of
Soft Baroque
Nicholas Gardner (b. 1988, Melbourne) and Saša Štucin (b. 1984, Kranj) of Soft Baroque (established 2013, London) work simultaneously in object design and art. Their practice focuses on creating work with conflicting functions and imagery, without abandoning beauty or consumer logic. They are keen to blur the boundaries between acceptable furniture typologies and conceptual representative objects. The refined and simplified forms of their works reflect principles of mid-century design, while at the same time veering towards conceptual territory by evoking the malleability of how objects are seen and mediated today. Processed materials manufactured for the domestic interiors are manipulated to unconventional ends.
Their work has been exhibited at the V&A, Christie’s, Somerset House, the Design Museum in London, Swiss Institute, Patrick Parrish and Friedman Benda in New York, Etage Projects in Copenhagen, Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and Biennale Arte (Milk of Dreams) in Venice.
Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Preformance Anxiety, Etage Projects, Copenhagen, 2023; ‘Inox Detox’, Barbati Gallery, Venice, 2023; ‘Clear cut, cave in’, Room 6×8, Beijing, 2022; ‘Sun City’, Milan, 2021; ‘World of Ulteriors’, Etage Projects, Copenhagen, 2019.
Recent writing for publications include: Natural Order & Violent Hobbies (Harvard GSD, 2021); Tag Poems (Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, 2020); Liquid Tension (Superposition, 2020).