Artists

Most art is made for walls, some for floors, others for entire landscapes. Jonas Richter, however, has claimed a stranger territory: the elevator. For more than a decade, the German-born artist has exhibited exclusively inside elevators, transforming the transitional space between floors into a site for art, ritual, and encounter.

“I am interested in pauses,” Richter explains. “Moments when people are suspended, neither here nor there. The elevator is the perfect theatre for that.”

A Moving Gallery

Richter’s exhibitions take many forms: a series of miniature paintings hung just above the floor buttons, an audio installation playing through the elevator’s tinny speaker, or sculptural objects tucked into the corner where people usually place grocery bags. Sometimes he simply alters the lighting or mirror to shift perception.

One of his earliest works, Fifth Floor, Please (2012), consisted of a sound piece of whispered voices that seemed to come from within the elevator walls, murmuring numbers, floor names, and fragments of overheard conversations. Passengers found themselves caught between intrigue and unease as the doors closed behind them.

Why Elevators?

For Richter, the elevator is not just a quirky location, but an essential medium. “It’s the most democratic space,” he says. “Everyone uses them,office workers, hotel guests, cleaners, executives. You don’t choose to enter an elevator gallery. The gallery finds you.”

He compares it to the intimacy of cinema, where strangers share a small, dark space. But unlike a movie theater, the elevator demands brevity. “I have maybe 20 seconds to show you something before the doors open. That urgency excites me.”

Unseen Audiences

Because his work appears in elevators without formal announcements, Richter’s audiences are often accidental. In one project, Up/Down (2016), he lined the interior of a hospital lift with photographs of staircases spiraling endlessly upward. Visitors later reported feeling disoriented, even dizzy, by the strange doubling of vertical movement.

Elevator staff sometimes remove his interventions, but Richter embraces the ephemerality. “I don’t need permanence,” he says. “The point is the encounter. Maybe someone rides between floors once, sees something strange, and never forgets it. That’s enough.”

Performances in Transit

Beyond objects and images, Richter also stages performances in elevators. In Lifted (2019), two dancers silently rode an office building’s elevator for an entire day, moving in slow synchrony each time the doors opened. Passengers stepped into the space and suddenly found themselves inside a performance,part participant, part audience.

“It was about turning the elevator into a stage,” he explains. “The everyday ride became charged, like stepping into a secret world for just a few floors.”

Reception and Recognition

Though Richter’s practice resists the traditional gallery system, his reputation has grown. Critics describe him as “the artist of in-between spaces,” and his projects have been supported by institutions who loan him elevators for temporary installations. In 2023, he staged a city-wide project in Berlin, installing 15 different works across public elevators in shopping centers, libraries, and train stations.

Still, Richter remains adamant: he will never exhibit in a conventional gallery. “Elevators are my canvas. They’re awkward, transitional, overlooked. That’s what makes them beautiful.”

Jonas Richter has redefined the way we think about art and space, turning one of the most mundane of human experiences,the elevator ride,into an arena for imagination and reflection. For a few seconds, between floors, passengers are no longer simply in transit. They are part of a fleeting, secret gallery that rises and falls, endlessly repeating, as long as the doors continue to open and close.

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.

At first glance, Yumi Hasegawa’s sculptures look like something out of a dream. Dining chairs curve into arcs as fluid as brushstrokes. Coffee tables fold delicately, their edges crossing like the wings of paper cranes. Stools stretch and twist until they resemble dancers caught mid-turn. It’s only when you approach more closely that you realize: these impossibly light forms are not made of paper, but wood.

Hasegawa, a Japanese sculptor based in Kyoto, has built an international reputation for transforming wooden furniture into what she calls “functional origami.” Using a combination of traditional steam-bending and contemporary woodworking techniques, she reshapes everyday furniture into fluid, folded forms that look too graceful to be real.

“I wanted to teach stiff wood how to move,” Hasegawa says, describing her practice with a gentle laugh. “Furniture has always been seen as fixed, obedient. But I see it as a material waiting to dance.”

From Architecture to Sculpture

Hasegawa trained as an architect before shifting to sculpture. Her early work dealt with modular structures, but she found herself increasingly fascinated by the lines of furniture,particularly chairs. “Architecture is big, monumental. A chair is small, intimate. But both are about holding the body,” she explains. “I realized a chair could tell the same story as a building, only closer to the skin.”

Her breakthrough came in 2015 when she exhibited a piece titled Folded Chair No. 1 at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. The work looked like an ordinary wooden dining chair until you noticed its backrest: instead of standing upright, it bent forward in a graceful arc, as though bowing. Viewers described it as both humorous and strangely poignant, an object acknowledging the people who would sit upon it.

The Craft of Bending Wood

The process behind Hasegawa’s pieces is laborious. She begins with ordinary furniture,often mass-produced pieces from thrift shops,and then subjects them to a combination of steam, pressure, and cutting. Wooden slats are heated until pliable, then coaxed into unexpected curves. The artist often describes this as a negotiation rather than a command.

“Wood doesn’t like to fold the way paper does,” she says. “Every piece has its own grain, its own stubbornness. I never know exactly where it will give way. I bend a little, wait, bend again. It’s like a conversation.”

The resulting sculptures balance fragility with resilience. Some resemble folded fans, others seem to twist like ribbons. In one striking series, a row of identical chairs has been bent into increasingly exaggerated poses, as if caught in a slow-motion sequence of gymnastics.

Furniture as Performance

Though sculptural, Hasegawa insists her works are still furniture. “I don’t want to strip them of their identity,” she says. “They are chairs and tables, just… transformed.” Many remain technically usable, though often in impractical ways: a folded chair might hold you, but you sit at a precarious tilt; a bent table still supports a teacup, though only at a single corner.

In exhibitions, Hasegawa sometimes invites visitors to sit on her works, turning the gallery into an experimental tea room. The act of sitting becomes performative, a negotiation between comfort and instability. “You become part of the fold,” she explains.

Cultural Roots and Inspirations

Hasegawa’s work draws deeply from Japanese aesthetics. She cites origami as an obvious influence, but also ma,the Japanese concept of negative space and intervals. “When I fold a chair, I am not only shaping wood, I am shaping the empty spaces around it. A fold is both material and air.”

She also acknowledges the influence of traditional crafts such as bamboo weaving, where strength emerges through tension and flexibility. “I want furniture to feel alive in the same way a woven basket does,” she says.

The Reception and Beyond

Collectors and museums have taken keen interest in Hasegawa’s work, and her pieces are now part of design collections in Tokyo, London, and New York. Critics praise her ability to “retrain the eye”,to make us see something as ordinary as a chair with fresh wonder.

Yet Hasegawa herself seems less concerned with fame than with continuing her experiments. She is currently working on a series of folding benches inspired by origami animals, each one suggesting the curve of a crane’s wing or the bend of a koi fish.

“I don’t want to make furniture more beautiful,” she says thoughtfully. “I want to make it more surprising. When you see a chair bow, or a table fold, you realize the world is less fixed than you thought. Even wood can learn to move.”

In Hasegawa’s hands, furniture is no longer heavy, or immobile. It becomes pliant, poetic,caught between utility and impossibility. Her sculptures remind us that the most familiar objects can still astonish, if only we learn to bend our assumptions.