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Artist: Sebastian Brajkovic

David Gill Gallery presents L’Anima Enigma, the latest exhibition by Dutch artist and designer Sebastian Brajkovic.

Continuing his longstanding engagement in reinterpreting classical furniture, the exhibition features a new body of work that spans furniture, lighting.

Evoking ideas of movement, spirit and nature, the title L’Anima Enigma reflects Brajkovic’s interest in finding a sense of life within seemingly static forms. “Anima stands for soul and spirit, or authentically air and breath, and enigma for something mysterious and contradictory,” he explains. “I want to give my work complexity, in a mysterious way, and purpose by searching for a spirit in the design.

Brajkovic is best known for using digital technologies to reinterpret archetypal forms. In 2006, for his degree show at Eindhoven Academy of Design, he presented his now iconic ‘Lathe’ series. Inspired by a technical mistake with a printer, Brajkovic used Photoshop and 3D modelling to stretch antique-style chairs into fluid forms. “This idea of movement started off very simply as a chair that extrudes,” he says. “Now I want to get more complex, to zoom into what you can actually see and try and evoke movement there.”

A key motif across the exhibition are sinuous, brushstroke-like shapes, which are created from sketches and rendered in patinated bronze, evoke the feeling of matter in flux. Brajkovic is influenced by the Proto-Renaissance to Renaissance and Neoclassicism to Impressionism, when artists moved away from simply capturing what they saw, towards conveying sensation and individualistic perception: “I think in a way that nothing stands still, everything has movement. I imagined that you were looking at something you find beautiful, and then you see it going in all these directions,” says Brajkovic.

Brajkovic started working with David Gill Gallery in 2018 with an inaugural piece Banquette that contorted a bench into a twisting posture. It is an idea he returns to in this exhibition, with three more upholstered and embroidered banquette works shown alongside two more benches. “I see the chair as having the same anatomy of a body,” says Brajkovic. Adding further body parts in pieces such as ‘One armed man,’ and ‘Yellow elegant,’ he develops this idea. “They turn and grow even more. I was trying to escape my own established ideas.”

Since 2020, Brajkovic has increasingly retreated to the analogue, an engagement which has reached a new, heightened emotional state in this new body of work. “I perceive a future where it will be difficult to find out what is handmade and what isn’t. I want to keep on showing how we struggle, the imperfections they are the beauty of the work,” he says. “When you make something, you leave your identity behind in it. You put your soul in it.”

The organic world is also engaged with Brajkovic. Several pieces are adorned with a serpent motif, which was initially developed through sketches and embroidery, evoking further the idea of bodies in motion. Created from sketches is a heron motif, which features on the collection’s mirrors, cabinet and buffet. The latter disrupts “grand” ideas of furniture through negative space and features a lock inspired by an Egyptian artefact, the earliest in human records.

“I would like people in the future not to understand what era my works are from. If they dug it up in 10,000 years, they would eventually understand it was by someone who wanted timelessness in their work, that it would fit everywhere—the past, the present and the future.”

New to his repertoire are three Guéridon tables which are wrapped around a solid orb-like shape, inspired by postmodern artist Jeff Koons use of spheres. “I wanted to add a sense of the extraterrestrial, something outside of human existence, or this eternal idea of beauty,” says Brajkovic. “Yet it also has something very natural to it, like a berry in a leaf.”

Brajkovic, whose work is held by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, describes approaching new ideas like a sculpture, allowing it to develop boundlessly with his philosophical and art historical frameworks. For this exhibition, however, he returns consistently to the idea of utility. “As they developed, we shaved the rough edges off the ideas, and scaled the pieces,” he says. “They ended up looking quite classic again because of that. Antique proportions fit well in the gallery space, which is a beautiful closing circle.”

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)