We are happy to feature new pieces to the gallery this May. The gallery remains open by appointment only — please contact the gallery to set up a time to view any of the pieces you see online. We are best able to help if you provide the pieces you would like to see prior to your appointment. For any requests beyond what you see online, please contact us and we can help source new pieces or refurbish from our stock.

JOHN SALADINO FOR DUNBAR POST + BEAM SOFA

This sofa, designed in the 1960’s, has been freshly reupholstered in boucle fabric and has a newly restored ash base. This design is a rare and sought after. It peels back the bulk of a sofa, with tall wooden legs and streamlined cushions. This sofa is perfect for occasional spaces— an office, entrance hall, sunroom.

IT WALNUT BENCH

Seth Keller has been a working artist for almost twenty years as well as working for the Art Institute of Chicago. Seth’s work is intimately related to exploring manufacturing processes, primarily working with wood. This piece allows the materiality to be showcased. By using simple forms, the color and movement of the wood comes to the forefront.

"ELATED VIBRATIONS"

Walter Fydryck has been working since the 1960’s and was trained at the Art Institute of Chicago. His paintings undulate and bend with colors morphing into others; abstract shapes hover over hazy backdrops. In this piece, Fydryck creates a crisp, futuristic abstract work. The monochromatic scheme and sharp, angular forms makes it seem almost metallic, the shape like a bent piece of chrome reflecting light.

This month we are happy to showcase new and treasured pieces at the gallery. New pieces by Finn Juhl and Warren Platner and works by Michael Lotenero and Mies van der Rohe are highlighted this month. We are available, as always, by appointment. Please reach out and we would be happy to set up a time to show these pieces.

FINN JUHL FOR BAKER FURNITURE CABINET

This cabinet was designed by Finn Juhl for Baker Furniture as part of the Baker Modern line. It is made of freshly restored teak and maple. Finn Juhl was an iconic Danish designer known primarily for his furniture and is credited with introducing this style to America. He studied architecture and began his career as a student working on interiors. He was brought to the American design market by being spotted by a MoMA curator and then being picked up to design a line for Baker. This piece’s design celebrates the materiality of the wood; the grain and texture becomes the star. The contrasting wood species highlight each other and the streamlined design is simple yet beautiful.

WARREN PLATNER FOR KNOLL SIDE TABLES

These side tables are emblematic of Platner’s designs, featuring the curving metal legs he is known so well for. The marble tops come in their original boxes from the 1980s; original glass tops are also available. The combination of materials in conjunction with the lines evokes the modern elegance of mid century design, utilizing classic materials with experimental forms. The marble tops almost hover, support by many spindly legs rather than any substantial forms. This adds to the modern flair: a heavy piece of marble almost floating.

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"DREAMSCAPE II"

Michael Lotenero creates evocative and dramatic abstract works. This large scale piece is oil on canvas, with bold and gestural marks against a black field. The majority of the forms rest within the middle linear portion of the piece, carefully evading the upper and lower portions. These contrasting marks seem to float in the black field, this dark container clearly behind the forms but also sheerly shrouding some. The artist clearly uses a variety of methods to create, with clear brush strokes slashing across the canvas, smaller messier fields, and long, almost scratch like lines that move across.

CROWN HALL: A-10

Crown Hall is one of the jewels of Illinois Institute of Technology’s campus. With long planes of glass held by black, steel beams, the space almost floats, with light pouring in from all sides. The building was designed in 1954 and is part of a collection of iconic early modern architecture on the school’s campus. It is the home of the College of Architecture and was finished in 1956. The space is almost entirely open, free from beams or structural walls, allowing it be changed and adapted to whatever is needed of it. This drawing comes from Mies’s office and comes from a set of technical working drawings.

ISAMU NOGUCHI IN-50 COFFEE TABLE

"In art, one does not aim for simplicity. One achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things." -Constantin Brancusi

Isamu Noguchi’s iconic coffee table is comprised of two pieces of solid wood, interlocking into each other to form a tripod base for the glass above. Constantin Brancusi’s influence is apparent in this work, through Noguchi’s time as Brancusi’s apprentice, with the use of organic shapes and assemblage. This sculptural design has proven the test of time through its unity of harmony, balance, and durability.

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EDWARD WORMLEY PYRAMID FLOATING BOOKCASE

Edward Wormley was a longtime director of the Dunbar furniture company, and brought modern design into midcentury residential homes. He had a deep appreciation for traditional design and impeccable craftsmanship. The Pyramid Floating Bookcase can be utilized against a wall or floating in a room to add more dimensionality to put your collection of books and objects on display.

UNTITLED BY SHINNOSUKE MIYAKE

Untitled beautifully captures an instantaneous moment and invites the viewer to be immersed in Miyake’s brushstrokes. The artist’s trust in his impulsive decisions is definite, bringing concrete yet fluid motions to the surface. Read Japanese artist Shinnosuke Miyake’s bio and view his other works here.

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The Windy City's Matthew Rachman Gallery takes a deep dive into the designer's practice.

by Thomas Connors | April 28, 2019

1stdibs: Introspective Magazine

Less is more,” that inescapable quote attributed to Mies van der Rohe, has long been modernism’s tagline. But when it comes to this year’s observances of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, where Mies was the final director, more is more. Two new museums are opening in Germany dedicated to the history and legacy of the forward-looking art and design institution. And special exhibitions are popping up from São Paolo to Tel Aviv that shine a spotlight on its faculty and students, who broke the barriers between artist and artisan, articulated a new partnership of form and function and reshaped the built environment. Of particular note is “Mies van der Rohe: Chicago Blues and Beyond,” running through July 21 at the Matthew Rachman Gallery in Chicago, where the designer settled after leaving Germany.

The Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, but Mies soldiered on in Berlin for another five years before emigrating to the U.S., where, in 1938, he became director of the school of architecture at Chicago’s Armour Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology, or IIT. From this academic perch, he profoundly influenced the course of architectural practice internationally. And from his own drafting table, he changed the look of his adopted city, completing such now-iconic projects as the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartment towers, the Chicago Federal Center and One IBM Plaza, as well as the IIT campus.

The show includes a Barcelona chair with a prototype cushion that Mies designed for his towers at 860–880 Lake Shore Drive. The chair, as well as never-before-seen ephemera, is on loan from T. Paul Young, an architect who worked in Mies’s studio.

Rachman — who last year mounted a show of works by Charlotte Perriand focused on Les Arcs, the ski resort she designed in the French Alps — has previously hosted two benefits in support of Mies’s Farnsworth House. (The “Chicago Blues and Beyond” opening, with architect Dirk Lohan, Mies’s grandson, on hand, was also a fundraiser for the Farnsworth House, which has been a house museum owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation since 2003.) With the Bauhaus anniversary approaching, he decided to build an exhibition around a cache of the designer’s blueprints he acquired several years ago. Now for sale, the blueprints are actual working documents used by junior and senior architects in Mies’s office. Some have never before been seen publicly.

A dozen clipboards hold working documents and correspondence related to the studio’s projects.

Among the plans, examples of which measure as large as 48 by 32 inches, is one for the Barcelona chair, done for the Wells Furniture Company, which manufactured the piece in the 1930s before Knoll began production. There are also drawings for architectural projects, including One Charles Center and the Highfield House condominium, both in Baltimore; 111 E. Wacker Drive, in Chicago, now home to the Chicago Architecture Center; and IIT’s Crown Hall, whose massive, column-free span epitomizes Mies’s embrace of utterly adaptable, universal space. It was built to house the Department of Architecture and Institute of Design.

These projects represented a leap forward in the architect’s career, an opportunity to build at a scale he had only imagined before the war. Advances in technology, access to materials and the willingness of American developers and corporations to get on board with modern design propelled him to a period of great creativity and success.

Rachman has taken a contextual approach to his installation of the blueprints on offer, interspersing the display with furniture and ephemera, much of it on loan from architect T. Paul Young, who at 17 became an office boy in Mies’s firm. “I’d pick up his cigars at Dunhill, organize files, things like that,” recalls Young, who advanced through the ranks to work on structures like the unrealized Mansion House Square, in London (his last project at the firm). “The office had a studio atmosphere, and there were long racks of blueprints of all of Mies’s projects. All the architects in the office would use those as reference. If they were designing louvers or a curtain-wall detail, they would be able to look at other buildings to see what was done and make it even better.”

Mies used these textile samples when designing the interiors of the Arts Club of Chicago in the early 1950s.

Among the materials from Young’s archive in the show are fabric swatches from the Farnsworth House and Mies’s sole interior-only project, the Arts Club of Chicago (razed in 1995); a rare bronze-frame version of the Brno chair manufactured by Brueton; a sales brochure for the 860-880 residences (“Mutual Ownership Offering Stability at the Lowest Possible Cost”); construction documents; and images produced by Hedrich-Blessing Photographers, the renowned architectural photography firm founded in Chicago in 1929. In addition, Rachman has on display and for sale two key pieces of furniture: an MR chaise longue, circa 1970, reupholstered in Brazilian cowhide but retaining the original strapping; and a Barcelona couch.  “We want people to see the different materials Mies used and to better understand these pieces — which they have seen many times in various settings — within the bigger picture of Mies’s work,” says Rachman.

Although later, less artful interpretations of the architect’s aesthetic contributed to the perception of modernism as manipulative and soulless (a critique initially applied to the master’s own work), he remains a giant in the history of the built environment, a man whose philosophy is, perhaps, as significant as the structures he designed. “In 1939, Mies gave a lecture to students in which he discussed designing a house,” notes Young, who serves as executive director of the Bauhaus Chicago Foundation. “He said that coming to the house, the front door, was the most important thing to consider. And as he concluded, he said, ‘The house is really the shell, and the life lived therein, is the bloom.’ And that was true whether he was designing a home or an office building or Crown Hall. He was setting a stage for living.”

Read the full article here.

Connors, Thomas. “How Chicago, Mies Van Der Rohe's Adopted Home, Remembers the Architect.” 1stdibs Introspective, 28 Apr. 2019, www.1stdibs.com/introspective-magazine/ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe/.

MILO BAUGHMAN MID-CENTURY MODERN CANTILEVER CURVED CHROME SOFA

This cantilever sofa by Milo Baughman, produced in the 1960s, has been freshly reupholstered with a plush poly blend that catches light in its weave. Contrasting soft, rounded edges with its clean-edged chrome, this design combines the organic shapes of contemporary furniture with MCM rectilinearity.

AZURE BY MAURA SEGAL

Azure has an entrancing washed blue background that underscores the sharp lines of its collaged paper. These thin lines that appear hand drawn, reveal themselves to be meticulously cut from strands of paper. Their craft gives them a wavering width and kinked bends that so well articulate Segal’s sensibility. Rigid like wire and sharp like the edges of tape, Segal places these lines to activate the borders of her paintings. Shadowy polygons hover beneath the artwork’s monochromatic background to highlight the negative space left by the foreground’s lines.

CURTIS JERÉ RAINDROPS WALL SCULPTURE MIRROR

Curtis Jeré, known for producing elegant brass and glass sculptures under Artisan House, made some of the most iconic wall pieces of the 60s & 70s. This mirror comes from one of Jeré’s most recognizable series: Raindrops. Characterized by its emphasis on circularity and reflection, Raindrops possess warm patinas and luminescent form.