Wendell Castle: Shifting Vocabularies

Over a prolific sixty-year career, Wendell Castle (1932–2018), a native of Kansas, approached furniture design as a sculptor.

Producing work in a vocabulary entirely his own, Castle considered form and function on equal ground. He defied categorization by generating creations that lay just outside the boundaries of art and furniture.

Finished with a slick oil-like surface Castle’s expressive and organic forms, are made from stained stack-laminated wood. They call into question what we consider a chair and our expectations of furniture.

Wendell Castle: Shifting Vocabularies features Castle’s latest and last body of work.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website 

Wendell Castle, American (1932–2018). Motown, 2016. Stained Ash, 34 1/4 × 65 × 40 inches. Courtesy of Wendell Castle Studio and Friedman Benda, Photography by Dan Kukla.