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Paul Evans Sculpted Bronze Brutalist Chair 1969
About the Item
Paul Evans (1931-1987), Sculpted Bronze Brutalist Swivel Chair 1969. Orange velvet upholstered cube lounge swivel chair with brutalist bronze sides. Chair is signed. Paul R. Evans II, known as Paul Evans, was an American-born furniture designer, sculptor, and artist, who is famous for his contributions to American furniture design and the American Craft movement of the 1970s, and with his work with the influential American manufacturer Directional Furniture. Evans was a leading figure in the mid century American studio and brutalist furniture movement. Known for his Mixed-metal modernisct sculpture, and furniture design. Evans first earned public notice with an exhibition that included his work in 1957 at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City.
Provenance: From a private collection. By repute, the chair was acquired by the owner in the early 1970s, and it was delivered by Paul Evans himself as well as the sister of their close friend, Barbra Streisand. Size: 31 x 31 x 29 in.
- Creator:Paul Evans (Designer)
- Dimensions:Height: 29 in (73.66 cm)Width: 31 in (78.74 cm)Depth: 31 in (78.74 cm)
- Materials and Techniques:
- Place of Origin:
- Period:
- Date of Manufacture:1969
- Condition:Wear consistent with age and use.
- Seller Location:Sarasota, FL
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU8572234556102
Paul Evans
A designer and sculptor, Paul Evans was a wild card of late 20th century modernism. A leading light of the American Studio Furniture movement, Evans’s sideboards, credenzas, coffee tables and other work manifests a singular aesthetic sense, as well as a seemingly contradictory appreciation for both folk art forms and for new materials and technologies.
Evans’s primary material was metal, not wood, which was favored by his fellow studio designers, and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, neighbors George Nakashima and Phillip Lloyd Powell. He trained in metallurgy and studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the famed crucible of modern design and art in suburban Detroit. For a time early in his career, Evans also worked at Sturbridge Village, a historical “living museum” in Massachusetts, where he gave demonstrations as a costumed silversmith.
Evans’s earliest work unites these influences. The pieces that made his reputation are known as “sculpted-front” cabinets: wood cases faced with box-like high-relief patinated steel mounts laid out in a grid pattern. Each mount contains a metal emblem, or glyph, and the effect is that of a brawny quilt.
Evans’s later work falls into three distinct style groups. His sculpted-bronze pieces, begun in the mid-1960s, show Evans at his most expressive. He employed a technique in which resin is hand-shaped, and later sprayed with a metal coating, allowing for artistic nuance in the making of chairs, tables and case pieces. Later in the decade and into the 1970s, Evans produced his Argente series for celebrated manufacturer Directional (a brand known to vintage mid-century modern furniture collectors everywhere): consoles and other furniture forms that feature aluminum and pigment-infused metal surfaces welded into abstract organic forms and patterns.
Last, Evans's Cityscape design series — a milestone in the history of brutalist design — meshed perfectly with the sleek, “high tech” sensibility of the later ’70s. Evans constructed boxy forms and faced them with irregular mosaic patterns that mixed rectangular plaques of chromed steel, bronze or burlwood veneer. These, like all of Paul Evans’s designs, are both useful and eye-catching. But their appeal has another, more visceral quality: these pieces have clearly been touched by an artist’s hand.
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