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NEW YORK - Wendell Castle's first posthumous exhibition is underway in New York, showcasing the evolution of the furniture maker's work throughout his legendary 60-year career.
"Wendell Castle: A New Vocabulary brings together rare, early, formative pieces with key works from the last decade of Castle’s long career, during which time he realized a body of work of critical importance and boundless ambition," says Friedman Benda, the gallery behind the exhibition. "Throughout a celebrated career spanning six decades, Castle introduced new ways of looking at, thinking about, and making furniture. In doing so, he created a new sculptural vocabulary that defied categorization and became the cornerstone of his practice."
By intentionally highlighting Wendell's early and late work, the show juxtaposes "the two extended moments in Wendell's career where he's employing essentially the same techniques and essentially the same methods of making, but the outcomes are very different philosophically, technically, and formally," gallerist Marc Benda told Architectural Digest. "Showing the vastness of Wendell's thinking from two very specific periods should make everyone pause and realize just how big a contribution he made over 60 years."
The exhibition runs through October 12.
Known around the world for unifying freeform sculpture and furniture making, furniture maker and sculptor Wendell Castle died early last year at the age of 85.
"One can’t seriously discuss the birth of art furniture and the studio furniture movement without talking about Wendell Castle. His work, especially the earlier pieces, which brought freeform sculpture and furniture together in one medium, influenced more than one generation of woodworkers and furniture designers," said Woodworking Network editor Will Sampson.
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ARTICLE Rememberance: A wave to Wendell Castle Wendell Castle passed away on Saturday, January 20, 2018, from leukemia, and I’ve just returned from an afternoon at his home. |
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Born in Kansas in 1932, he studied both industrial design and fine arts degrees at the University of Kansas, and practiced as a sculptor and designer for more than four decades. Though he worked with many materials, wood was often his material of choice.
"Wood and bronze are the ideal materials for furniture," Castle said in an interview with Dezeen last year. "They provide unlimited opportunities to do pretty much anything you want in regards to form."
Having never taken a formal cabinetmaking or furniture course other than a woodshop class in the seventh grade, Castle used to obtain wood from a gunstock factory, using rejected stock blanks. He used a drill press and a band saw. “I dowelled everything because that’s all I knew,” he said. His early furniture all came out of his study of sculpture.
“How come furniture can’t be art,” he asked. “I did pieces as sculpture, but it was really furniture.” He started to question basic furniture design tenets. For example, he asked why legs have to come out of the bottom of a table and then built a coffee table in which the legs flow around the sides and suspend the top from above.
Castle taught at RIT from 1962 to 1969, and was an artist-in-residence there up until his death.
"Wendell Castle is known the world over for his contributions to the field of art and design," said Josh Owen, professor and chair of RIT's industrial design program. "He gifted us with his enthusiasm, his eagerness to collaborate and share, and his generosity to deliver his intentions with tangible and always elegant results."
Castle's works can be found in the collections of over 50 international museums.
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