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Three black soft-edged, irregular cone-shaped forms nuzzle each other to approximate a tripod. From the central leg, a flat-topped, curved-bottomed surface, with a teardrop-shaped indent, is cantilevered out into space. Whether seat or table, “Suspended Disbelief” (2015) is as radical an artistic statement as it is a piece of furniture.
Carved from stacked layers of ash by a robot, then hand finished, stained and oiled, it epitomises the charismatic sculptural furniture pioneered in the 1960s by the late Wendell Castle, founder of the American Studio Furniture movement.
Next week, a solo show of work by Castle, also called Suspended Disbelief, opens at Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s Ladbroke Hall space. This is the first solo show of work by Castle — who died in 2018 — in London since 2011.
Much feted and collected both by museums and individuals in the US (where a 1994 Visionaries of the American Craft Movement award, sponsored by the American Craft Museum, and a 1997 gold medal from the American Craft Council was followed in 2007 by the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum), Castle’s work is less welll known in Europe.
When Carpenters Workshop Gallery co-founder Loïc Le Gaillard first met Castle in the noughties, he discovered Castle had never even been to Paris and offered him a show in London in 2011 and in Paris in 2012. “It was a fantasy to think we might work with this master of American design,” Le Gaillard says.
He cites Henry Moore and Jean Arp as reference points for Castle’s organic forms. Castle was born in Emporia, Kansas, in 1932, growing up in a series of rural towns in the Dust Bowl era. First studying industrial design at the University of Kansas, he graduated with an MFA in sculpture in 1961.
His earliest experiments with furniture used gunstock blanks from a local factory. But it was his use of a technique used for creating duck decoys, carving through layers of stack-laminated wood, that led to the work he was renowned for, sometimes blending multiple furniture forms into a cohesive sculpture. Collectors included US institutions such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA.
As well as a visionary maker, Castle taught at universities and, in 1980, opened his own not-for-profit school for woodworking and furniture design, which eventually became part of the Rochester Institute of Technology. By this time, however, Castle’s own interests had moved on from carved wood to fibreglass, inspired by the postmodern exuberance of Italian furniture, as well as to the traditional joinery of Art Deco masters like Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann.
It was not until the 2000s that Castle began to revisit his earlier, organic, stack-laminated processes. When market interest surged in the kind of “design art” pieces that had made his name, Castle began to evolve new bodies of work through conversations with his galleries — Friedman Benda and R & Company in New York; Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London and Paris.
Combining contemporary computer-mediated technologies with his earlier robotic and hand-finishing techniques, such as chiselling and rasping, Castle created increasingly complex forms at a scale not possible previously. He was also able to experiment with bronze.
“We felt this was his strongest language,” Le Gaillard says, “I think Wendell came to complete maturity in the last 10 years of his life. You have form; you have beauty; you have physics; you have comfort.” Le Gaillard reports that Castle would never work from detailed drawings, instead responding directly to the material: “There was an intuitive magic in the work of Wendell, he would just carve.” And yet the pieces, while eccentric, are perfectly balanced: “The cantilevers are particularly interesting to me,” says Le Gaillard.
The pieces on display at Ladbroke Hall represent the gallery’s years of collaboration with the artist. But the formal invention, sculptural surfaces and poetic titles (“Seventh Night”, “Whispering Winds”, “This Side of the Blue”) are Castle’s own.
For Le Gaillard, Castle “is the perfect proof that form should triumph over functionality — and yet still be functional. This is collectable design at its highest realisation.”
“Suspended Disbelief: Wendell Castle”; February 9-April 26; carpentersworkshopgallery.com
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