Pair of sculptural chairs by Heinz Landes, 1980s.

Pair of surprisingly comfortable sculptural chairs by Heinz Landes, 1980s. Landes.

Postmodernism took many forms in the 80s. Both the Italian Memphis Group and the German ‘Neues Deutsches Design’ subverted the expectation that design should aspire to functionalism. But whereas the Memphis group celebrated synthetic, whimsy and bright colours, the Northern European movement preferred gritty industrialism. Heinz Landes’s (1961-present) Solid Chair epitomises this rough, rebellious aesthetic, a design equivalent of post-punk. Landes, an independent artist living and working in Germany, constructed it in the year he left the University for Applied Design in Pforzheim. Looking like a set of pliant reinforcing rods growing from a block of structural concrete, the chair exudes a brooding mechanical grandeur. Versions of it have been owned by Die Neue Sammlung, Munich and Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. SETPRICE

They are in great structural condition. There is some unevenness to the rods and the concrete, it is not clear if this was an original design feature. H 85cm W 45cm D 46cm