Two Artists Who Make Furniture Out of Colour

|Archicomma
Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen do not apply colour to a finished object. The colour and the material are the design.
Two Artists Who Make Furniture Out of Colour

Muller Van Severen was founded in 2011 by the Belgian artist duo Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen. Their work sits somewhere between design and art, drawing on a shared passion for architecture and materials, and they have collaborated with international museums and galleries alongside their production work.

Four Bar Stools along a counter, each with a different top on the same aluminium frame. The frame is the product; the colour is the choice.

The same object, twice

What they keep returning to is colour and material. Rather than hiding what a piece is made from, they look for ways to give the material its own presence — the surface is the point, not something applied over the top.

The Bench in alu and in green, photographed in the same corner of the same concrete room. Nothing about the form changed. It is a different piece of furniture anyway.

That is the whole argument, and it is easier to see than to explain. Put the two benches side by side and the green one looks lighter, shorter, more like an object and less like a piece of building.

Close up, the reason it works: a single folded top sitting on a square leg, with the join left visible. Bench Ivory.

The same logic runs through the bar stools, the alu chairs and the marble lamps — a small number of parts, chosen finishes, and no decoration doing work the material could do on its own.

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