Salon 94 and Cristina Grajales Gallery are pleased to present Functional Sculpture / Sculptural Furniture by Chilean-born, New York-based artist designer Sebastian Errazuriz.

Errazuriz co-opts the standard design objects of our daily lives – a bike, a lamp, a table, a door, a swingset – and asks viewers to look again, to linger a little longer, and to question our accustomed design. Errazuriz re-makes familiar objects, adding humor, darkness, profanity, shock, provocation, obsession, and mortality. His interventions include: a lamp made by replacing the head of a taxidermied chicken with a lightbulb; a racing motorcycle where the engine doubles as an open casket for a small bird; swapping out the seat of a playground swingset for a child-size wheelchair. The irreverent and often shocking functional objects, can also be seen as memento mori furniture – works about our own mortality and our fragile bodies. There is often a wink and homage to a period style, art historical movement or authorial voice.

The dual exhibitions act as mirrors, turning known artworks into functional design and cabinets into theatrical, sculptural stages for objects. Re-visualizing and re-engineering the familiar pieces of our lives, Errazuriz turns them around and backwards, reflecting one another.

For the centerpiece of his show at Salon 94, Errazuriz considers our contemporary relationship to Antiquity and its myths with a grand shelving system made from a marble replica of the Venus d’Arles. The shelves play on the raw look of scaffolding – through which tourists often view the antiquities of Europe, in perpetual state of conservation, with hidden parts and obstructed views of the whole. The half-naked, half-draped body of Venus is one we know well from standardized form. Venus, the goddess of beauty, was a favorite theme of Greco Roman sculptors, re-made in similar ways in marble and plaster through art history. The original Venus d’Arles was a gift from Julius Caeasar to the city of Arles and was lost until it was uncovered by 17th century Versailles and given some cosmetic work by the sculptor of Louis the XIV. Because of these transformations, the Louvre still today does not know whether to place the work in the Greco Roman section of the museum of the 17th Century galleries. The piece continues to sit in the storeroom, forever invisible to a viewing public. Errazuriz here pairs the seen with the unseen, and playfully uses the Venus replica as a home design object, confounding classification, and turning a famed sculpture into a functional furniture piece.

Another new work at Salon 94 collides the numerous divisions within visual arts and design. There is the art historical legend of Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, 1965 – an artwork that similarly resisted categorization within the museum. The three elements of the piece are a generic photograph of a chair, an actual ordinary wooden chair, and the dictionary definition of the chair. The urban legend of the piece is that the museum that owned it did not have a department for “conceptual art,” so it was stored according to the logic of the museum: the actual chair in the design department, the photograph of the chair in the photography department, and the definition in the library! Paying homage to this story and humorously, inextricably connecting the three elements, Errazuriz makes a single chair with object, photograph, and definition in one piece. Recontextualizing this seminal work, he also places the multiple realms of the object – material, visual representation, and language – onto the surface. Extracting the buried alternates of the object and affixing them to the surface is representative of Errazuriz’s larger project, which defies single meanings, styles and classifications.

The concurrent exhibition at Cristina Grajales Gallery is a play of six cabinets in dialogue. Errazuriz opens up the cabinet in exciting new ways, reinventing the standard box where personal treasures are stored. The idea of “opening” the cabinet is an exercise in turning functional object into sculpture. Re-shaping standard engineering, Errazuriz’s Explosion lays bare the nucleus of the cabinet when the connected exterior panels are pulled outward; Kaleidoscope multiplies the interior objects with mirror paneling; Porcupine’s individually controlled quill-like slats can lay flat or be configured outwards; Mini Magistral has an aggressive exterior of 20,000 outward facing bamboo skewers; Wave has a vertical orientation like the scissor doors of a Lamborghini; and, Samurai is enclosed with a tight black elastic like a warrior’s armor.

Sebastian Errazuriz was born in Santiago, Chile in 1977, raised in London, and moved to New York in 2004. Errazuriz was selected as one of the top emerging designers by I.D. magazine in 2007, and in 2010 he received the title of Chilean Designer of the Year. In 2011 he won the Compasso d’Oro, one of the highest honors of industrial design. The first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work, Sebastian Errazuriz: Look Again, is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh from September 6, 2014 – January 12, 2015.