Erik Thörnqvist »Natural Born Sitter«

The cantilevered design, with its elegant defiance of gravity, evokes a time when form and function were inextricable from the hope of a better future. But as this chair stands today, it speaks to a modernism that has been sanitized, untethered from its political roots. Yet, what was once a radical break with tradition has now been transformed, the raw force of its history softened by time, polished into a commodity. Natural Born Sitter subtly questions how these once-disruptive symbols of the machine age have been absorbed into our culture, their revolutionary spirit muted, their legacy repurposed as monetary and aesthetic capital.

Through sculpture and installation, Erik Thörnqvist's body of work delves into historical and fictional narratives to unearth how an idea takes a material form. The blurring of what is fixed, or the collapse between fiction and fact, serves as a point of departure in his artistic practice. He aims to communicate this in his works as a spectrum and a gradient of experiences and possibilities, rather than as polarizing opposites. It reflects the idea of taking a misstep or how the omission of narration leaves space for something to be filled in.

Thörnqvist is captivated by the intricate connections between ideas, politics, and ideology and the ways in which they materialize. He is intrigued by the metamorphosis of a sketch on a designer’s notepad into a tangible object like a chair, or by how the rhetoric of a politician transforms into a housing project that becomes the lived reality for people. The materialization of ideas serves as a point of reflection on the dominant ideologies and power structures in our society, and he seeks to explore these intersections and manifestations in his work.