Sculpted Steel Low Table

About the Item

Paul Evans (1931–1987) was a visionary American furniture designer, sculptor, and artist celebrated for his groundbreaking role in the American Craft Movement of the 1970s. Renowned for his bold, Brutalist-inspired sculpted metal furnishings, Evans set himself apart with a style that fused fine art with functional design. He is perhaps best known for his innovative collaborations with Directional Furniture, where he pushed the boundaries of craftsmanship, form, and modern aesthetics. His pieces often feature hand-welded, textured metal surfaces that feel both raw and refined. Collector and performer Lenny Kravitz once described Evans’ work as “stunningly beautiful, stunningly ugly, stunningly tacky, [and] stunningly sophisticated”—a reflection of the dramatic contradictions that make his work so captivating, influential, collectible, and enduringly relevant today.

Creator:
Paul Evans (Artist)
Dimensions:
Height: 35 in (88.9 cm)Width: 35 in (88.9 cm)Depth: 20 in (50.8 cm)
Style:
Brutalist (In the Style Of)
Materials and Techniques:
Glass,Steel,Cast
Place of Origin:
North America
Period:
1960-1969
Date of Manufacture:
1969
Condition:
Seller Location:
New York, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU800844478042

Shop All Paul Evans

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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