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All criteria we follow could be a harmony of apparent contradictions, try to include past and future as they are oppositions, and they work well together… In a way it is all about not losing ethics that brought us further when searching the new and unfamiliar.

In mijn werk zoek ik altijd naar schijnbare contradicties tussen werkelijkheid en verbeelding. Ik tracht uiterlijke vormen te laten wijzen naar het surrealistische. Een repeterend verhaal in mijn werk is het verstillen van beweging, alsof men oog in oog staat met een verschijning. Daarbij wordt het verhaal soms zo belangrijk, dat de praktische ervaring van het object een secundaire rol gaat spelen. Dit is een bewuste keuze want het leidt mij in de zoektocht naar de grenzen van de kunstnijverheid; vormgeven of laten ontstaan.

Sebastian Brajkovic

mail me

If you would like to see my work visit The carpenters Workshop Gallery in London Mayfair/ 3 Albemarle Street London W1S 4HE cwgdesign.com
or SPAZIO Rossana Orlandi | Via Matteo Bandello 14/16 20123 Milano rossanaorlandi.com

take a close look to the work of Deniz Seyda Tunca as her film amalgates between enscenated and found beauty.
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Lathe Chairs show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery 2009

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Lathe Chairs show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery 2009 /u
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Is it symptomatic of our recessionary times that imaginative designers seem pre-occupied with history and memory? The young designer Sebastian Brajkovic believes that “truly new and useful products and ideas unite the future, present and past”. His furniture could not exist without historic styles and furniture-making techniques, or our appreciation of them. He shares with his audience an understanding and respect for what has passed, but he does not merely reproduce traditional styles in a bid to replicate history. Rather, Brajkovic transforms and mutates archetypal shapes into new forms, using contemporary technologies. These hybrids exist entirely in their own present, but are built on our recognition of the past within them. Born in Amsterdam in 1975 to a Dutch-Indonesian mother and a Croatian-Italian father, Brajkovic studied cabinet-making before enrolling at Design Academy Eindhoven with a conscious intention to meld art and design. Brajkovic’s method is original but visually quite obvious. He stretches and contorts the shapes of familiar chair types so they appear blurred in the centre while remaining crisp at the periphery. The classic proportions of each chair seem to be enhanced rather than destroyed by the designers’ intervention. There is a kinetic quality to the works as they appear to be caught in motion between states, like moving objects on film, and Brajkovic admits the influence of cinema. They are called Lathe chairs because of the notion that they are made by lathe turning. It is a simple idea, beautifully and elegantly rendered. With several chairs it is possible to imagine where the rotation point is located, often just beyond the field of the chair itself. Lathe Chair II appears to be spun around an invisible point just behind the seat; Lathe Chair IV has been rotated around a point at the base of the front right leg, causing the left side of the chair to topple through ninety degrees. The conceptual device of rotating the chair encourages us to reconsider our sense of the space it inhabits. In our imagination we can continue the rotation, through floor or wall planes, inscribing perfect circles. Like reflections in a fairground hall of mirrors, the chairs contort perspective and our sense of reality. The chairs derive from nineteenth century rococo and classical revival models in shape, and although they are conventionally upholstered, Brajkovic does not replicate traditional woven silk covers. Lathe Chair VIII depicts mythical beasts and Lathe Chair V bears medieval knights. Common to all the upholstery is the machine-embroidered ‘smear’ of imagery connecting the peripheral elements. These lines follow and visually reinforce the rotation through which Brajkovic has spun the chair. While studying with Jurgen Bey at Eindhoven, Brajkovic made his first Lathe chairs in 2006 by deconstructing existing furniture. Bey’s concern for revisiting historical furniture types is evident in the works of his student. For later editions Brajkovic translated the wood into cast bronze with a beautiful gray patina like slate. The transfer from wood to bronze invites us to regard these furniture items as sculptural forms. The most recent addition to the Lathe series is a new departure: a low table with the exaggerated profile of a pedestal base. The entire table has been cut from aluminium on a lathe using a computer controlled chisel arm to exactly recreate Brajkovic’s original drawing. The circular whirls in the table top are deliberately visible, and tighten at the centre so that, as Brajkovic observes “now the table looks like it is spinning, just as it did on the lathe bench before it was ready.”

Gareth Williams
Royal College of Art
27 January 2009

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Lathe Chairs show at Carpenters Workshop Gallery 2009, Lathe Chair III

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consangenious furniture for Lebesque Eindhoven on the salone del mobile Milano 2008

img alt="consangenious furniture" src="1b.jpg" width="60%" Align="left" border="1"/p img alt="consangenious furniture" src="2.jpg" width="60%" Align="left" border="1" my decor is the dreamworld, or actually the world where things happen that won't occur in normal life. in a way I want to tell that industrial design is at its end. nowadays everything that the mind can make up is produceable and within reach of the public, so products that tell a typical industrial/economic story of useability and sustainability are to me out of fashion. the user will (in my opinion) ask more of a product than only the beautyness of useability or materialisation. he/she wants also explanations for things that happen in the back of our heads.

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Lathe Chair VII for Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Design miami/basel 2008

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Usually the materials or forms I use are from products that already proved themselves as worthy. Like the lathe chair series for instance, the forms are used from old chairs, these old chairs lay easy on the eye because they are recognizable, in a way they are accepted. If I want to explain a chair that looks like its moving, it will explain itself better when you recognize the old and familiar chair in it.

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Lathe Chairs, my gradation project. Designacademy Eindhoven 2006

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sinking glass, a glass project... in Amsterdam 2007

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img alt="sinking glass computed" src="sinking-glass-computed.jpg" width="60%" Align="left" border="1" With the Sinking Glass project I wanted to confirm my interest for often seen sights of stuff half sunken in the stream. Half is above half is undersea. A simile for water could be glass as it has the same clarity but stilled. With little imagination you can observe vases submerging at open water, as they are carrying the waterline.

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Lathe Chair V for Carpenters Workshop Gallery at DesignArt London 2007

financial times wrote: Hello dear friends and members, This past Monday, just after 1pm, 19 people seated around a lunch table at Browns restaurant in Mayfair turned a young furniture designer, Sebastian Brajkovic, into a museum-quality artist. Sebastian Brajkovic’s Lathe Chair VIII: They decided, with a simple show of hands, that his Lathe Chair VIII should be purchased by champagne house Moët Hennessey and placed into the permanent collection at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. But the judges weren’t the real kingmakers at the table. The man Brajkovic needs to thank is V&A curator Gareth Williams, who had spent the previous 18 hours evaluating DesignArt London, a show of limited edition contemporary and 20th-century furniture and objects. He opted to put the Lathe chair alongside two other pieces on the judges’ shortlist. “I’ve been watching his work for a while so it was a straightforward and easy one for me,” Williams says. “We’re working on an exhibition, Telling Tales, looking at the design-art movement, the rise of limited edition work by designers, particularly those who have stories to tell related to history or paradigms, and this piece fits in perfectly.” Such decisions are important because “design-art” is a fledgling collecting category. It has been buzzing in recent years, with a proliferation of fairs around the world and some six-figure sales of limited edition or one-off works by stars such as Zaha Hadid and Mark Newson. But the global financial crisis could easily dampen demand, especially for less established designers, making institutional endorsement and investment even more critical. Williams began his work at 6pm on Sunday night with “a bit of a recce” to the DesignArt tent in Berkeley Square, where the gallerists and dealers were still setting up their stands. “Trying to shortlist from a show that wasn’t yet built was difficult,” he acknowledges. But he had a brief – to select a piece by a living designer – and a budget – £15,000 – so found a “a handful” of pieces to consider. When it came to best in show, opinions were deeply divided. Spaghetti Cortem, a flamboyant outdoor bench by Argentinian designer Pablo Reinoso at Carpenters Workshop Gallery was popular, while lighting by Christophe Côme at Christina Grajales’ stylish stand was deemed “poetic and beautifully simple”. Other favourites included a table by Matteo Bonetti and stunning work by Zaha Hadid, both at David Gill. But half the judges wanted older, historic pieces to be recognised instead, prompting an argument – and Dixon’s frustration. The result was a compromise: two bests in show for Côme’s Double Loukoum and a bookshelf by Italian legend Gio Ponti. On Monday morning he returned to narrow his choices and speak to dealers about discounts, since most will take 10 per cent or more off for museum buyers. He settled on two pieces: Brajkovic’s, a classic chair split and stretched into two seats, cast in grey-coated bronze and upholstered with embroidery, shown by London’s Carpenters Workshop Gallery and priced at £16,000; and The Elegance Throne, a seat made of rusted, deactivated firearms by Mozambique’s Gonçalo Mabunda listed at £15,700 by Paris-based Perimeter Editions. Choosing the third was more difficult. One option was Rock Fusion Soft, a £19,950 patchwork blue felt sculptural stool or bench designed by Arik Levy and shown by Paris’s Mouvements Modernes. But, at the other end of the tent, London’s Rove gallery had two earlier iterations of the “faceted” Rock Fusion design in bronze and stainless steel, the latter priced at about £25,000. The problem with both was price. At 11am Williams was scheduled to reveal his choices to the judges but, looking for their own “best in show” picks, with champagne glasses in hand, they proved impossible to corral. He used the time to give V&A director Mark Jones a quick private preview of the “mutated” Brajkovic chair, one of a limited edition of eight; Mabunda’s “found objects” throne, a one-off; and the soft Levy piece, one of nine. They ended at the Rove stand, in front of the metal Rock Fusions, and Williams huddled with the dealer, Kenny Schacter, for a moment. One word – “discount” – was audible and Schachter later confirmed he had agreed to “donate” his upside to move into the V&A’s price range. Finally, at 12.30pm, Williams gathered the judges. Some had already peppered him with questions: “What gaps do you need to fill?” “How much do you have to spend?” But he would only say he was looking for contemporary pieces “amid all this mid-century modern” and that the Moët gift was “generous but it’s not going to get us a piece by Zaha”. And so the tour began. Sidestepping ladders and vacuum cleaners, Williams led the judges to the still-under-construction Carpenters Workshop Gallery space, where the Lathe chair was hidden in a corner. “Four people, clean hands,” snapped dealer Loïc Le Gaillard, summoning employees to move the heavy piece into the light. He provided Brajkovic’s background – Dutch-Indonesian mother, Croatian-Italian father, now based in Amsterdam and focused on “reinventing” classics – then Williams gave his pitch. “It’s directly looking at history but inspiring something new, which is a good theme for the V&A,” he said. Plus, “it would go straight into an exhibition next year, which is important for us.” Next up was The Elegance Throne. “This designer was born in 1975, I believe the year war broke out in Mozambique,” Williams explained. “I have to admit I didn’t know about him before but I’m pleased to discover him. I found this a really powerful piece. And we’d like to extend our collection of African material.” The Mouvements Modernes stand with the soft Levy piece was just opposite but, instead of stopping, the curator walked past, judges in tow, heading for the Rove stand to show them the metal Rocks. “This would be good to have on the grounds that it’s an aesthetic advance by an established designer and we don’t have anything by him,” Williams concluded. Tour complete, the judges trooped off to eat and vote for their favourite. Brajkovic’s won by a large majority and Williams says he wasn’t surprised. “I could make a very strong case for that one because that was the piece I knew we could fit into a project. I think it’s quite important that we show it and use it rather than put it away.” As for the non-winners: “I’d love to show Arik Levy’s work if we can find the right piece at the right price. And I’m very taken with [Mabunda’s] work now too. I think we’re going to pursue that piece.” Whether non-institutional buyers will spend money on design-art in these straitened times is another question. Williams hedges his bets. “One scenario is that it’s seen as an area with potential for growth in values when compared to contemporary art. People are wondering where to put their money and at least these are tangible assets. Conversely, it’s such an emerging market, it could get knocked for six. However, I hope those with the ability to support designers and museums continue to recognise the long-term gain.”

Lathe Table for Carpenters Workshop Gallery presenting Januari 2009 in London