Robert Wilson: Chairs

Edited with text by Owen Laub. Text by Robert Wilson, Glenn Adamson, Trevor Fairbrother, Marie de Testa, Dung Ngo. Photographs by Martien Mulder.

Raisonné and August Editions, 2024. 152 pp.

This unprecedented angle on Robert Wilson’s oeuvre reveals the importance of chair design for his cross-medium art.

For American experimental theater stage director and playwright Robert Wilson (1941-2025), theater was a totality of visual, textual and performative mediums. Wilson incorporated furniture designs into his scenography since his earliest productions in the 1960s. "In almost all of my plays, there is a chair specially designed," he said. "Often, the chairs are much like an actor." Wilson’s chairs, with their frequently referential names (the Kafka Chair, Queen Victoria Chairs, the Mondrian Chair), assume expanded significance as the surviving artifacts of each performance.

The works in this publication range from 1969 to 2011, from the stainless steel mesh Parzival Sofa (1987) to the painted wood Clementine Hunter Rocker (2011). Wilson’s practice as a designer is illuminated by his practice as a collector, with pieces in materials ranging from wood, bronze and steel to taxidermied legs, tempered glass and neon. This publication includes several works never previously exhibited.