John Pawson

Waddesdon Bench

2012

Plaster
45.7 x 45.7 x 27.9cm.

John Pawson CBE designed the Waddesdon Bench as part of an exhibition of contemporary sculpture at the Rothschild collection, Waddesdon manor. All works in this exhibition responded to Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin’s ‘Boy Building a House of Cards’, 1735.

“There are visual echoes here of Chardin’s precisely positioned playing cards, but in place of a simple, repetitive structural form, the work reads as a seamless extrusion, its monumental mass always in tension with the refinement of it lines. The smooth, polished surface of the stone has a powerfully tactile quality, but equally critical to the piece’s character in the idea of the hidden void, flaring and tapering through its core.” John Pawson