Untitled (Wooden Sculpture, Chair)

After relocating from Prague to the west, Magdalena Jetelová first gained recognition for her oversized sculptures, which included tables and chairs made of raw timbers. While she used highly diverse artistic media in her later work, the chair in Pulheim is typical of her early works and their diverse reference points.

The chair, enormous and reduced to its basic form, is positioned as if it were descending the stairs, almost like a living being: art historians can’t help but think of Marcel Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase. Additionally, viewers may associate the raw timbers with prehistoric architecture, pilework, and half-timbered buildings.

The chair also formally corresponds to the surrounding architecture and its vertical and horizontal elements. Finally, it poses the question of who should sit on this simultaneously unstable and monumental piece of furniture? Considering when it was created, the sculpture takes on a further, unexpected political dimension.