103 - Pierre Castignola (born in 1995)
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Estimate €32,000 - €40,000

Description

Pierre Castignola (born in 1995) Not a plastic chair Armchair Cast bronze, polished 2025 H56 W57 D83 cm 45kg With *Not a Plastic Chair*, Pierre Castignola subverts the conventions of the one-piece plastic chair, a universal industrial object and symbol of mass production. By recasting this familiar form in cast and polished bronze, the artist radically transforms its materiality, weight and status. The contrast between the object’s apparent banality and the preciousness of the bronze transforms this archetypal chair into a true sculptural piece. Its title, Not a Plastic Chair, ironically highlights this ambiguity between a functional object, an icon of everyday life and a work of art. Created in 2025 as a unique piece, this work straddles the boundary between contemporary art and collectable design. Pierre Castignola has made the one-piece plastic chair – a universal industrial object and symbol of mass production – the central material of his work. With *Not a Plastic Chair*, he takes this reappropriation to its logical conclusion: the familiar form is retained, but transposed into cast and polished bronze, which radically alters its weight, value and status. The title ironically highlights the ambiguity between a functional object, an icon of everyday life and a work of art, in an approach reminiscent of ready-mades and Pop Art. Created in 2025 as a single piece, the work straddles the boundary between contemporary art and collectable design. The repurposed model has its own history. First conceived in the 1960s by Verner Panton, Joe Colombo, Vico Magistretti and Helmut Bätzner, the chair – moulded in a single piece – only entered true mass production after 1972, with the Armchair 300 by the French engineer Henry Massonnet, manufactured in under two minutes by his company Stamp. As it was not patented, the design was copied all over the world and sold in the billions. The critic Alice Rawsthorn compares it to Thonet’s Chair No. 14, and in 2025 the MoMA included it in the exhibition *Pirouette: Turning Points in Design*. A controversial icon, banned from public spaces in Basel from 2008 to 2017 and now a symbol of throwaway culture, the Monobloc remains a powerful cultural marker: two of them feature on the cover of Bad Bunny’s *Debí Tirar Más Fotos*, named Album of the Year at the 2026 Grammy Awards. By casting it in bronze, Castignola gives this object—which has neither a designer nor any intrinsic value—the permanence and status of a sculpture.

See original version (French)

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About the sale Sculptural furniture and functional art

Auction location

Auction time 10/25/2026 at 2:30 PM

Lot description modified on 10/08/2026 at 5:26 PM

Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House

103 - Pierre Castignola (born in 1995) See original version (French)

103 - Pierre Castignola (born in 1995)
See original version (French)