Muller Van Severen, "Designer(s) Of The Year" 2023

Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen met at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. Hannes trained there in sculpture and Fien in photography. Thus nourished by the visual arts and endowed with a fundamental plastic understanding, they began collaborating in 2011. Today based in Evergem, a small town on the outskirts of Ghent, the fusional couple creates there an egalitarian design. Somewhere at the crossroad from Marcel Breuer’s radical Bauhaus and Charlotte Perriand’s visionary functionalism, Muller Van Severen merges the vocabularies of the plastic, graphic and decorative arts to blur the border of the intimate.

A walk through their teeming creative terrain, the exhibition opens the doors to the designers’ interiors and brings together a selection of iconic works from the Muller Van Severen catalogue: “We wanted to recreate a landscape representing the main elements of our daily life: our house, workshop and garden. Three islands will recompose, in the middle of the fair, our little oasis in the Evergem desert”, explains Fien Muller. “The exhibition will act as a global and immersive installation where our pieces will exist as many small autonomous architectural entities. It will be a mirror of our interior but also our mind”, says Hannes Van Severen.

A tri-dimensional decor erected in the heart of Maison&Objet Paris and connected by paths allowing a triangular circulation in the couple's cocoon, the exhibition's scenography imprints on architectural principles and allows an exercise in creative psychology: “We see design as a territory with marked borders. The arts field can seem frightening as it is vast and rich in possibilities. Our creativity expresses itself best within limits imposed by the object.” Says Hannes. “The walls around the booth symbolise this border: inside, our objects coexist as part of the same world, in the same intimate space”, adds Fien.

Bold colours and formal purity

A suspended bubble, the stand thus unfolds a panorama of Muller Van Severen's explorations, playing with materials and colours. This distinctive approach is always clearly embodied in their “furniture sculptures”, considered as so many small independent architectures responding to each other in their formal purity, as much as they individually invite a renewed sensory experience of the object. Their striking blues, reds, greens and yellows are reminiscent of the chromatic observations of Piet Mondrian and De Stijl’s neoplasticism.

These colours were repeated by touches in the Future Primitive collection, a founding series commanding the Muller Van Severen signature style: fundamental minimalism where sobriety, functionality and collectible design rhyme. For Maison&Objet Paris, the couple presents shelves of different heights and configurations, incorporating deckchairs and floor lamps into the frames. Stripped assemblies, these pieces merge yet complex functions to highlight better the essential: “We have a primitive relationship with objects. Our approach, between simplistic lines and bright colours, is resolutely playful. The contrast between the desire to control the form and impose minimalist contours while letting the colours express themselves freely is a great amusement”, explains Fien.

Pleasant new collaborations revealed at Maison&Objet!

A joyful dexterity echoing the theme “Enjoy” of this edition of Maison&Objet is also reflected here in the naive and light lines of the nevertheless masterful steel wall cabinets of the Wire series. It is also the case of the tubular repetitions of the ALLTUBE benches and cabinets, which reconcile the look and the touch with a too-often depreciated aluminium material. These emblematic series dialogues here with brand new productions and commissions, including a series of vases for Bitossi or a floor lamp developed for Valerie Objects. 

Exclusively in France, Muller Van Severen is also taking advantage of Maison&Objet Paris to present two new rugs developed for the leader in upholstery textiles, Kvadrat, which caused a sensation at the last Salone Del Mobile in Milan. Entitled “March” and “July”, the two models whose structures and surfaces are inspired by the different stages of natural shearing of a sheep, share a unique production method. 

“For these new pieces, we have created families of different colours in search of balance and imbalance. Colour, like taste or smell, can trigger powerful emotions and memories”, details the duo.

Exclusively for Maison&Objet, Muller Van Severen presents new productions mainly elaborated for the Danish brand HAY, enriching an already acclaimed cooperation.

Driven by this constant concern to probe all the corners of the fields of sculpture as much as of design, free from all academicism, Muller van Severen offers objects that are exhibited as much as they are experienced and lived, being able to find their proper place in the white cube of a gallery, as well as in the private comfort of a living room

Are we looking at a “furniture” or an “art” piece? The answer needs to be of more importance to our “Designer(s) of the year” who pursue, like tightrope walkers, their progression on this tenuous and wavering thread suspended between the worlds of art and design. What a joyful balancing act!