Jeroen Verhoeven

This lot is offered together with a certificate of authenticity from the artist.

The present “Cinderella” Table by Dutch designer Jeroen Verhoeven demonstrates a perfect synthesis of eighteenth-century tradition and twenty-first century technology. While a student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Verhoeven researched antique furniture in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum and found inspiration in the serpentine curves of the Rococo movement. He considered decorative arts from this period to be exemplary of the very best attributes of craftsmanship, and aspired to revive and reinterpret these qualities in his own work. Beginning with two-dimensional drawings of commodes and tables, Verhoeven developed a digital three-dimensional form through the use of CAD-CAM (computer-aided design and manufacturing). Though this software is generally associated with mass production, he was able to achieve an irregular, sinuous shape to rival that of any Rococo cabinet maker before him. 

To translate his design into the physical realm, Verhoeven selected a birch plywood cube as his raw material. Plywood has its own esteemed place in the history of design, popularized in the first half of the twentieth century by the innovative bent chairs of Alvar Aalto, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, among others. Using a computer numerically controlled laser, Verhoeven cut the plywood into 57 precise slices that he subsequently glued together by hand to achieve the final design. One side of the table retains the voluptuousness of a bombé chest with tapered cabriole legs, while the reverse simplifies the ornate model to a hollow silhouette. Though the table does not feature any extravagant gilt bronze mounts or decorative veneer, the complexity of the birch layers is as mesmerizing as inlaid marquetry. The “Cinderella” Table was created in a small edition of twenty, three of which have been acquired respectively by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum.