Walking into a gallery of Clara Jensen’s work feels like stepping into a dissection room. Familiar armchairs sit beneath bright lights, but their upholstery has been carefully sliced open. Springs protrude like ribs. Padding hangs in tufts like torn muscle. Frames, once hidden, jut out like bones. These are not broken objects, they are sculptures, laid bare by an artist intent on revealing what comfort conceals.
Jensen, a Danish conceptual artist, has gained recognition for transforming furniture into raw metaphors for the body. Her practice is rooted in one simple act: peeling. By cutting, flaying, and exposing the structures inside sofas and chairs, she turns everyday objects into haunting meditations on fragility, trust, and the unseen.
“Furniture is intimate,” Jensen explains. “It holds us, it supports us, and yet we almost never think about its insides. I want to show what we rely on without ever seeing.”
From Design Student to Disruptor
Jensen began her career as a furniture design student in Copenhagen, studying the principles of balance, ergonomics, and form. But she quickly became frustrated with the field’s obsession with sleek surfaces and flawless finishes.
“I felt suffocated by perfection,” she recalls. “All the invisible work was hidden under upholstery, under polish. I wanted to tear it open.”
Her first “flayed” chair emerged during her final year of study: a classic Danish armchair, carefully sliced along the seams. Viewers were shocked not only by the violence of the gesture but by the strange tenderness it revealed. Beneath the clean lines and smooth fabric lay something messy, fragile, and surprisingly human.
Anatomy Lessons in Comfort
In many ways, Jensen’s work reads like anatomy. Springs resemble veins, wood frames mimic skeletons, and layers of foam call to mind fat and muscle. By exposing these hidden systems, she asks viewers to think differently about both the objects and themselves.
“Just as we trust our bodies to hold us up without ever seeing our bones, we trust furniture,” she says. “I want people to question that trust, not to lose it, but to understand it.”
Her installations often heighten this association. In one exhibition, she arranged a series of gutted sofas on stainless steel tables, as if in a morgue. In another, gallery lighting was replaced with surgical lamps, so the viewer felt complicit in the act of exposure.
Violence or Care?
While some critics describe her work as violent, Jensen resists the label. “It’s not destruction, it’s uncovering,” she insists. “To open something is not to kill it. It is to know it more deeply.”
Indeed, there is a strange tenderness in the way she re-stitches seams after cutting them, or how she props up exposed springs so they don’t collapse entirely. She refers to her process as “excavation” rather than deconstruction, suggesting a respect for the craftsmanship buried inside.
The Body in the Room
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Jensen’s work is the way it implicates the viewer’s own body. Standing before an opened chair, it’s impossible not to think of skin, organs, and bone. Sitting on one of her pieces, something she occasionally invites in controlled performances, feels precarious, even intimate.
“You feel the springs shift under you,” says one visitor. “It’s like sitting inside someone else’s body.”
Jensen sees this discomfort as essential. “We live surrounded by surfaces that reassure us, smooth walls, polished tables, upholstered chairs. But we are fragile, stitched together just like these objects. I want to put the fragility back into the room.”
Reception and Legacy
Jensen’s work has been exhibited across Europe, often in both design and fine art contexts, where it unsettles the boundaries between the two. Collectors sometimes request pieces for their homes, but she insists they remain in the gallery. “They aren’t furniture anymore,” she says. “They are questions.”
Her upcoming series, Holding Patterns, will expose not only the interiors of chairs but also reinforce them with translucent resin, freezing their fragile systems in a state of permanent vulnerability.
By cutting open sofas and armchairs, Clara Jensen reveals more than just stuffing and springs. She exposes our reliance on the unseen, our trust in hidden systems, and our own uneasy relationship with fragility. Her work is not about comfort, but about what lies beneath it, and the unsettling knowledge that, like furniture, we too are stitched, padded, and held together by structures we rarely see.
