Eleven striking pairs of Rietveld’s furniture and sculptures by Ruud Kuijer
Exhibition, Centraal Museum Utrecht

For Kuijer, Rietveld / Rietveld, Kuijer, Dutch sculptor Ruud Kuijer (1959) curated eleven striking combinations of chairs from the famous Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) and his own sculptures. The focus is not on Rietveld as a designer, architect, or member of De Stijl, but specifically on the process of making a chair versus making a sculpture. Particularly, Rietveld’s early and lesser-known works reveal a making process rooted in the inherent
properties of the materials used.

In this approach Rietveld and Kuijer meet. For Kuijer, it has been a guiding principle of his abstract sculptures since the 1980s. Kuijer extensively studied the world’s largest collection of Rietveld furniture at the Centraal Museum Utrecht, choosing from over 300 Rietveld items and more than 480 sculptures from his own oeuvre. Each pairing highlights a specific, formal sculptural quality of a Rietveld chair. Ruud Kuijer further explored these ideas through an interview with British-American sculptor and art historian William Tucker, who specifically researched Rietveld’s early chairs in the context of modern sculpture. Together, they meticulously reviewed the selection of chairs and sculptures for this unique publication on the sculptural Rietveld.