Konstantin Grcic: Hieronymus

Galerie Kreo presents Hieronymus by Konstantin Grcic, the German designer’s latest work on view through 14 July 2016. The exhibition is a set of five furniture chairs inspired by 15th-century furniture depicted in the painting St Jerome in his Study by Antonello da Messina.

The five pieces are a contemporary elaboration on the furniture images in da Messina’s 1475 masterpiece translated into the 21st century meaning of inner space.

Hieronymus is the Greek and Latin form of the name Jerome. In the Italian painting, Jerome, the saint, sits in a space that is his own. It is a space within a space, a room inside a room; and in that space, he reflects and exists. The scene’s perspective is enforced by the intellectual inner space materialized into a physical interior space, where the theologian, the thinker, and by extension, every human being is made to feel his interiority.

In Grcic’s designs, he emulates this inner space with small pedestal pieces by means of the materials used. He designed the furniture using fibre-cement, aluminium, marble, 3D print, all of which offer a certain amount of theatricality, seemingly separating us from the world; metaphysically becoming a space inside a space.

Grcic’s designs are not otherworldly, but instead deeply and quintessentially of our world, if we accept them to be what they are—in tension. The 3D pieces help us to define the space in which we want to exist; the inner space that can become where there is work and study, passion—the meaning of the Latin word “studium.”  

Each of Grcic’s designs offer a variety of seating places and positions, creating a way in which furniture constructs an environment in itself, as seen in the saint’s study. His products are characterized by a careful research into the history of design and architecture and his passion for technology and materials.

The Hieronymus exhibition at Galerie Kreo runs from 23 March to 14 July 2016. 

Galerie Kreo: 31 Rue Dauphine, Paris.