OV36
 “Form Follows Function”:
Marcel Breuer >< Anneke Eussen

OV Project is delighted to present Form Follows Function, its 36th project–a presentation of works by Anneke Eussen (b. 1978, Netherlands), and the titan of Modernist design, Hungarian-German architect Marcel Breuer (1902-1981).

The dialog presented in the exhibition unfolds firstly through the material considerations of each practitioner–communicating confrontations of forms, shapes, curves, and abutments of industrial yet sensuous connections. Subsequently evolving to address the temporal aspects evident in the juxtaposition, along vectors of sight, touch, posture and approach. The dialogics of lightness and strength frame the presentation. The artists’ respective deployments strategically facilitate a deterioration of the rationality that is part and parcel to industrial production–the subject of their meditations.

Grounded in early Modernist fascination with speed and progress, Marcel Breuer’s designs employ then-state-of-the-art techniques, resulting in modular, machine-like constructions entry into the domestic setting. His early works, designed and executed at the Bauhaus, typify the layering of industrial functionality atop of domestic usage–echoing fellow architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1908 quotation: “Form and function should be one, joined in spiritual [removed];

Anneke Eussen’s sculptural constructions, converge on the wall with a sideways glance towards the Dadaist collage traditions. Working entirely with found materials, she searches for artifacts, here they are fragments of commercially produced glass. Discarded as having reached the terminus of their usefulness, they are resurrected as poetic objects of transcendence. The artist describes her practice as a cultivation of the found materials; an exploration of their narrative potential. She stops short of manipulating the silhouette of any given fragment in favor of subtler processes. Instead she relies on methods of arrangement, layering the pieces to formulate the pictureplane.

Breuer, while helming the woodshop at the Bauhaus, categorically disregarded the organic material. Inspired by his own bicycle, he famously ordered bent piping directly from the manufacturer to produce the ‘Wassily Chair’ (after Breuer’s instructor, Wassily Kandinsky), which resided in the lecturer’s lounge at the school. As if folding his disregard back on itself the chair went into production at Thonet–a company known to this day for popularizing bentwood furniture in the late 19th century. This momentum is echoed in the stance of his other chairs–the 301, 331 &[removed];and the kinetic spring of the 1090 and 1093.

As much as Marcel Breuer’s bicycle propels us towards inevitably, the shattered contours of Eussen’s compositions glance retrospectively at traces, engaging with amorphous narratives—memories that cling like dust to a mirror. The works are deep reservoirs of energy expended, corroborating elusive histories: of light cutting through them, a multitude of contacts, from both humans and machines, a lens through which we view the world, together with a reflection of ourselves.

In each practice, objects dictate experience. They shape and link it to the wider world of functional design, through twists and turns towards the poetic, the personal, the transcendent. Harnessing energy, rendering coldness as warmth–the warmth of a body on a chair, the perspectival gaze into the abyss of the layers of history.

Marcel Breuer (b. 1902, Austria-Hungary, d. 1981, New York City) was a pioneering architect and designer of Modernism, particularly Brutalism and the International Style. In 1991, the New York Times regarded his chairs as some of the most important works of their kind produced in the 20th century. He was one of the earliest students of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar Germany, where he was in charge of the carpentry workshop, and studied under painter Wassily Kandinsky (for whom his most famous chair is named). Breuer emigrated to the United States in 1937 (naturalized in 1944), becoming a faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, at the invitation of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. In the US he designed, among others, the IBM Research and Development Facility; the Whitney Museum of American Art (at 945 Madison Av.); the US Department of Housing and Urban Development; and St. John’s Abbey.

His archives are stewarded by the Syracuse University library, Syracuse, New York, and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington [removed], and New York City.

Anneke Eussen (b. 1978, Netherlands) is a contemporary artist living and working in Vaals, Netherlands. She graduated from the Academy of Maastricht, Netherlands, and completed a post-graduate residency at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts, Brussels. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Schwerin, Schwerin, DE; the Suermondt Ludwig Museum, Aachen, DE; Lauren Marinaro, New York, NY; Document, Chicago, IL; and Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, BE.