Wendell Castle, Arm in Arm

Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2018

Often credited as the founding father of the American Art Furniture movement, Castle has redefined sculpture and functional design by seamlessly merging the two into one practice that is uniquely his. Throughout his six-decade career, Castle constantly reinvented his practice, incorporating a variety of forms, influences and techniques in a conscious effort to shake up the field of contemporary design. He developed a strong technical understanding of how form and function unite, which the present work fully reflects. 

 Arm in Arm beautifully embodies Castle’s organic and whimsical approach to sculpture, here beautifully rendering his signature carving technique onto a patinated bronze body. Smooth and textured surfaces coexist and complement a dynamic form reminiscent of his earlier, stack laminate sculptures in wood, further echoed by the organic and curved shapes of the seat’s overall structure. This monumental seating installation was designed and executed towards the end of his career, at a time where he was exceptionally prolific. By then the artist was no stranger to designing works of such scale, having produced a significant number of them for decades prior. 

His favorite furniture form, he said it himself, was indeed the chair, because of its inherent challenges and its inability to become a familiar object.“Since you sit in a chair, it immediately becomes an intimate object, one that you constantly test by sitting and thus have a relationship with,” Castle once said. The present work further reinforces the idea that Castle was more than a visionary furniture designer but a truly accomplished sculptor working across mediums and scale, and whose work continues to provoke and inspire.

A testament to his legacy as a multidisciplinary sculptor, Castle work is included in the permanent collections of more than forty museums and cultural institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the White House in Washington, D.C. Moreover, he has been the recipient of many honors and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants and the Modernism Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.