Muller Van Severen

Hannes Van Severen: The scenography is a reflection of our home situation. We have a little oasis away from the noise, away from the city, away from everything. We close our gate and we are together with our house, our studio and our garden. It’s like three islands with a path in between and four walls disconnecting us from the outside. We’ve made a big installation with selected objects from our 12 years of collaboration.

Fien Muller: We wanted to isolate ourselves a bit from the noise here at Maison & Objet, too, and invite visitors to discover our world.

Fien Muller: We met at art school in Ghent in 2001. I had already studied photography but I wanted to study sculpture so I enrolled at the sculpture academy.

Hannes Van Severen: We’d already been working as individual artists for about 10 years after graduating and were exhibiting at a gallery in Ghent. But somebody from Antwerp [Valerie Traan] who had been following our work was opening a new gallery at the intersection of art and design and invited us to have an exhibition. We’d always wanted to work together but didn’t know how. This was a good opportunity to start working together in a different medium making functional objects.

Hannes Van Severen: The problem was that we didn’t have electricity over our heads where we wanted to have a table, so we created this table with a lamp. It grew into a whole exhibition with furniture that has multiple functions.

Fien Muller: One idea comes from another. We start with something, then think about adding a rack or a lamp, or when you add a shelf to it, it becomes a table. It’s also important that we have a poetic feeling and language, as well as staying very technical and radical. That balance is interesting; we want to have both in one piece. It has to be functional and radical but also be warm, calm and poetic. Sometimes it’s also about making something more sculptural.

Hannes Van Severen: Yes, it comes from the gut and it’s always very much in line with what we were doing before but not consciously. We have the need to make these things that we do. It’s the language that we speak together, between the emotional and the rational. We don’t have to speak that much to each other to understand what we are going to.

Hannes Van Severen: Architects like Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Mies Van Der Rohe… But we find inspiration everywhere. I don’t really have heroes.

Fien Muller: Also artists like Giorgio Morandi and Gordon Matta-Clark. But the constant dialogue we share is the most inspiring thing, I think, going from a swimming pool to a museum to a store. It’s daily life that inspires us the most.

Fien Muller:  It was part of the installation that we presented in 2012 at a group exhibition, ‘Future Primitives’, at the Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk, Belgium. We wanted to make an object that has the feeling of something human happening with it. We were also thinking about how we could be together, how could people sit down, have a chat and be close to each other. Even when there’s nobody sitting or using our furniture, it has to have something symbolic like a narrative.

Hannes Van Severen: In visual art, we could do anything we wanted. But we felt liberated when we were making functional objects because there was a border and a function. For us, it’s very liberating to have the freedom to work within this limitation.

Hannes Van Severen: We had the opportunity to work with Bitossi Ceramiche, a ceramic company from Tuscany, and we were invited to visit their factories where we saw this beautiful old way of working with clay and ovens. We gave ourselves a task: making vases. We were at the airport and all we had with us was A4 paper and a pen. We decided to give the vase the standard A4 form and to just work on its base. We began drawing a lot of interesting bases from which we just selected eight [for the ‘Onda vase’, 2023].

Fien Muller: Function is also a limitation for us: in a vase, there has to be flowers. So it’s thinking about how the flowers fall and whether the height is OK. So there’s a functional and formal limitation.

Fien Muller: Yes, exactly. We express our first little ideas by drawing but we go almost immediately to the one-to-one scale by starting to make mock-ups and the first prototypes. We have an idea about an object’s proportions and how it behaves towards a human being. We think it’s very important to begin immediately in the space.

Hannes Van Severen: We also like transparency and thin lines that are like drawings in space because we like to respect the background. We also like to make small installations or landscapes with our objects that are connected to the floor and the wall and to play with the right balance between absence and presence, and between breaking out and being tamed by something.

Hannes Van Severen: It started from a study into this wire mesh material with which we created a whole family of objects. We liked to have this transparency because they’re present but you can also see through them. They respect the building behind and nature. It was again about furniture having a balance between absence and presence.

Hannes Van Severen: Yes, like the ‘Alltubes’ furniture collection (2020), which was made with the repetition of an aluminium tube. We were at the welder’s where we saw all these tubes layered together on a rack which was really inspiring. So we started working with this element and tried to investigate what we could do with it to reach its maximum potential. The tube has a roundness that through repetition becomes like a wave and the lines reflect, like in the water. Our goal is always to do something wild within this strict frame. It’s a little like breaking out and being tamed, between being calm and wild, and finding that harmony. ‘Alltubes’ is also a good example of how the material is navigating you, telling you how far you can go.

Fien Muller: An interest in working with aluminium also runs in the family. Hannes’ father, Maarten Van Severen [Belgian designer and interior architect, 1956-2005] worked with aluminium.

Hannes Van Severen: First we made the lamps, then we made the trolleys and mirrors with the repetition of those arcs. There’s an undeniable DNA and language in what we’re making.

Fien Muller: The colour, like the material, comes at the beginning because it creates character and influences the form of the design.

Hannes Van Severen: We gave ourselves the brief to start working from a sheet of metal. And just by cutting and folding cardboard on a one-to-one scale, and creating functions like lighting and mirrors, we made this series of wall objects. They also refer to poetic scenes like the moon or a window, bringing another dimension because it’s something you know.

Fien Muller: There’s something very Belgian about ‘Frames’, like a Surrealist background in a Magritte painting. We weren’t aware of that when we were making the series but sometimes things are in your background or DNA.