The Russian Museum is hosting an exhibition entitled ‘Armchairs, Chairs and Stools in Russian Art of the 18th–20th Centuries’ until 10 October. The curator is Yulia Demidenko, who is known for such projects as ‘Body Memory, Underwear of the Soviet Era’ (2000–2005) and Fashion and Socialism (2007).

The main ‘protagonist’ of the exhibition, as the title suggests, is the chair as an artistic object. This is the first project of its kind for the Russian Museum, which has a large collection of material culture objects but rarely exhibits them.

In the 20th century, when functionalists and theorists of the Bauhaus school sparked widespread interest in the construction of objects rather than their external appearance, objects such as chairs began to receive a great deal of attention. Not only industrial designers, but also leading architects of the time turned their thoughts to chairs. The great German modernist architect Mies van der Rohe uttered the sacramental words: ‘A chair is a very complex object. It is much easier to build a skyscraper.’ By rethinking the chair, this ‘cornerstone’ of everyday life, designers rethought everyday life itself, its structure and, as a result, ways of sitting. However, the concept is not new: in both the 18th and 19th centuries, the chair was a kind of testing ground for the structure of the future, a point of search for the ideal parameters of the human body, new materials and social constructs.