Kuijer Rietveld

For Kuijer, Rietveld / Rietveld-Kuijer, Dutch sculptor Ruud Kuijer (1959) curated eleven striking combinations of chairs from the famous Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) and his own sculptures. The focus is not on Rietveld as a designer, architect, or member of De Stijl, but specifically on the process of making a chair versus making a sculpture. Particularly, Rietveld s early and lesser-known works reveal a making process rooted in the inherent properties of the materials used.

In this approach Rietveld and Kuijer meet. For Kuijer, it has been a guiding principle of his abstract sculptures since the 1980s. Kuijer extensively studied the world s largest collection of Rietveld furniture at the Centraal Museum Utrecht, choosing from over 300 Rietveld items and more than 480 sculptures from his own oeuvre. Each pairing highlights a specific, formal sculptural quality of a Rietveld chair. Ruud Kuijer further explored these ideas through an interview with British-American sculptor and art historian William Tucker, who specifically researched Rietveld s early chairs in the context of modern sculpture. Together, they meticulously reviewed the selection of chairs and sculptures for this unique publication on the sculptural Rietveld.