Fredrikson Stallard: The Show That Asked Whether Furniture Was Imitating Ice

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 10 min

In September 2017, Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard filled David Gill Gallery in St James’s with acrylic that looked like melting ice, alabaster carved thin enough to glow, and a mirror that recorded the motion of a hand. The show was called Intuitive Gestures, and its real subject was what happens when two designers let a material’s own behaviour finish a design they only half controlled.

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Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard have spent two decades making furniture that behaves like something else. A table reads as a glacier. A lamp reads as a lit coal. A shelf reads as a line of handwriting. In September 2017, the London studio brought that habit to David Gill Gallery’s St James’s space for Intuitive Gestures, an exhibition of new furniture, lighting and wall pieces that ran from 13 to 28 September, opening four days before London Design Festival began and continuing through the festival’s core week.

The show marked eleven years of the studio’s relationship with the gallery, which has represented Fredrikson Stallard since 2006. It brought together four bodies of work: the acrylic and bronze Antarctica series, the alabaster Torch lamps, the Scriptus mirrors and shelving, and a set of Untitled pieces in blackened steel, leather, marble and wood. Each read as an argument for the same idea, stated differently in a different material: that the most interesting design decision is often the one where the maker stops directing the material and starts negotiating with it.

That argument is worth taking seriously, because it is easy to mistake for a slogan. Fredrikson Stallard’s own account of the show’s title, Intuitive Gestures, is a translation of physical movement and subconscious thought into three dimensions, work that captures the energy of making rather than the record of a finished plan. What follows is what that actually meant, piece by piece, and where the studio had already rehearsed it a year earlier in a very different material.

Antarctica: is it ice imitating furniture, or the other way round

The Antarctica series was the show’s centrepiece: a large dining table, a set of gueridon side tables, and a coffee table, all in clear acrylic, alongside versions cast in patinated bronze. The acrylic pieces were built up in thick, stacked sections rather than moulded as a single block, which is what gives them their internal weather. Light entering the acrylic refracts and magnifies through the layered thickness, throwing distorted, moving shadows underneath the piece that shift as a viewer walks around it, the same way light behaves inside a real block of ice.

Fredrikson has described the process behind the series as close to sculpture in reverse: the forms read as if a tool had been hacking away at a solid block of ice, roughing out facets and fracture lines, rather than as furniture built up from a design drawing. The bronze gueridon versions took the same fractured, glacial geometry and cast it in a material with none of acrylic’s transparency, so the same silhouette reads as a frozen block in one material and a weighted, ancient-looking artefact in the other. Shown side by side, clear and bronze, the two versions of Antarctica ask the question the studio has built the whole series around: is this ice imitating furniture, or furniture imitating ice.

Where Antarctica came from: a year cutting crystal for Swarovski

Antarctica did not arrive from nowhere. A year earlier, at London Design Festival 2016, Fredrikson Stallard unveiled Glaciarium, its first collaboration with Swarovski’s Atelier Home collection and the first time the crystal house had invited an outside studio to design chandelier components from scratch. The collection paired four chandeliers, Avalon, Helios, Superline and Voltaire, with a set of vases, bowls and candle holders, all developed from the geometry of raw, uncut crystal.

The technique the studio used for Glaciarium is the direct ancestor of Antarctica‘s acrylic. Each piece was cast first, then faceted by hand, combining a controlled, engineered process with the irregular, found quality of a mineral that has grown rather than been designed. Fredrikson and Stallard have described the aim as a piece that feels inevitable rather than made, something that looks like it could only ever have taken the form it did. Moving from cut crystal to cast acrylic a year later kept that same logic and changed the scale: where Glaciarium was jewellery for a room, Antarctica was furniture built at the scale of an iceberg calving.

Torch: alabaster carved thin enough to let the day through

The Torch table lamps took a slower material and did something faster to it. Alabaster is a soft, translucent mineral, either gypsum or calcite depending on where it was quarried, historically cut into thin sheets for church windows in Byzantine and medieval Italy long before it became a lamp material. It is far softer than marble, which is exactly what makes it usable this way: gypsum alabaster can be scored with a fingernail, and a carver can take a block down to a few millimetres of thickness without it fracturing, something no true marble would tolerate.

Fredrikson Stallard carved the Torch lamps down to that threshold, thin enough that the stone stops reading as solid rock and starts behaving as a diffuser. Alabaster’s internal veining, normally invisible in a thicker block, becomes the entire visual event once the stone is thinned this far: cloud-like striations of colour appear inside what looked, from outside, like plain pale stone. Because the lamps respond to whatever light hits them, each one effectively has two states. During the day, daylight passing through the shade turns the veining a soft, milky grey. In the evening, with the internal LED lit, the same veining glows amber and gold, and the piece reads as a different object entirely from the one seen a few hours earlier. Few materials change character on that kind of daily clock without any mechanism beyond the sun going down.

Scriptus: a mirror and a shelving system that record the hand

Scriptus took the show’s gestural argument furthest, because it makes the gesture legible as a specific kind of mark: handwriting. The Scriptus mirrors, in stainless steel with an MDF back, and the Scriptus shelving, a five-metre modular run in patinated and lacquered steel, both trace their geometry back to the circular, looping motion of a pen moving quickly across paper, the kind of unconscious mark-making that happens when a hand is thinking rather than drafting.

On the shelving, that motion becomes structure: the shelf lines waver rather than run straight, each one following a slightly different arc, so the whole five-metre run reads less like storage furniture and more like a single sentence of calligraphy fixed in metal. On the mirrors, the same gestural line becomes the frame around a reflective surface, so the object doing the framing is itself a piece of frozen motion. Stallard has spoken about using reflection as a way of painting with light within a room, and the Scriptus mirrors are the plainest demonstration of that idea in the show: the mirror does not just reflect whatever is in front of it, it reflects it through a frame shaped like a gesture that has already happened and cannot be repeated.

Untitled: black steel meeting leather, marble and wood

The Untitled group was the show’s quietest section, and its job was to prove the same intuitive language worked at a smaller, more domestic scale. A side table and stool paired patinated steel with Kenyan black marble, wood and leather. A standard lamp combined patinated, lacquered steel with a silk shade. A chair set a spare, tapered steel frame against aniline leather upholstery. None of these pieces had the scale or the visual drama of Antarctica or the five-metre run of Scriptus, and that restraint is the point: it shows that Fredrikson Stallard’s material instinct is not a trick that only works at spectacle scale. Put the same blackened steel next to marble instead of acrylic, and the studio is still making the material do the talking, just more quietly.

Who Fredrikson and Stallard are, and how they got here

Patrik Fredrikson, born in Malmö in 1968, and Ian Stallard, born in Essex in 1973, met as students at Central Saint Martins in 1995, Fredrikson working in product design after earlier architectural training in Copenhagen, Stallard specialising in ceramics. They exhibited separately at small UK fairs for several years before their breakthrough piece, the Log Table of 2001, a design later acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum for its permanent collection in 2009. The studio formally launched under the name Fredrikson Stallard in 2005, and joined David Gill Gallery the following year, debuting with a set of rubber and polished steel Bergère armchairs.

The eleven years between that debut and Intuitive Gestures had already produced a body of work that explains why the gallery kept giving them the space: King Bonk in 2008, chairs chainsaw-carved from polystyrene; Gasoline Garden in 2009; Crush in 2012, furniture built from the aesthetics of a collision; and Gravity in 2016. Their work sits in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the French national art collection and the Belvedere in Vienna, and the studio has twice been named Designer of the Year by Wallpaper magazine, in 2007 and 2017, the second award landing the same year as this show. Since 2007, the pair has also produced the annual Prologue sculpture for the British Fashion Awards red carpet, a large-scale Swarovski crystal commission that runs alongside their gallery work rather than instead of it.

David Gill Gallery, and the show it was quietly answering

David Gill opened his first gallery on Fulham Road, Chelsea, in 1987, showing modernist figures including Giacometti, Jean Cocteau and Henri Matisse alongside furniture by Le Corbusier and Jean-Michel Frank. He moved the gallery to a converted warehouse in Vauxhall in 1999, then to its current home at 2-4 King Street, St James’s, opposite Christie’s, in 2012. Over four decades the gallery has built one of the most significant rosters in collectible design, representing Zaha Hadid, the Campana Brothers, Mattia Bonetti, Grayson Perry and Fredrikson Stallard among others, with pieces from its stable held by the V&A and SFMOMA.

Here is the connection that turns Intuitive Gestures from a strong show into a particularly well-placed one. When David Gill opened the King Street gallery in 2012, the inaugural exhibition was Zaha Hadid’s Liquid Glacial, a series of tables cast in acrylic to resemble melting, fractured ice, one of the defining shows of the space’s early identity. Five years later, in the same rooms, Fredrikson Stallard hung Antarctica, acrylic furniture built on an almost identical premise, glacial fracture rendered in cast, transparent plastic. Neither studio has said the later show was a deliberate response to the earlier one, and there is no need for it to have been: the coincidence still means that St James’s gallery has now opened its most significant decade with two different designers reaching for the same material to solve the same visual problem, an unbroken thread of acrylic ice running through the space’s history that nobody currently writing about either show has drawn out.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Intuitive Gestures as a show about ice, because Antarctica gave it the strongest single image and the title everyone remembers. That undersells what actually held the exhibition together. The through-line was not a material or even a season. It was a method: Fredrikson and Stallard choosing a material with strong behaviour of its own, acrylic that refracts, alabaster that thins into light, steel that can be made to waver like a pen line, and then designing just enough to set that behaviour in motion before stepping back.

That is a harder discipline than it sounds. Anyone can make a table. Making a table that still looks like it is behaving according to its own physics, five years after the same gallery opened with Zaha Hadid doing something structurally similar in the same material, takes a studio that trusts its own instincts over a finished drawing. Intuitive Gestures was the clearest single statement of that trust the studio had made in London by 2017, built from four different materials that all, in the end, said the same thing: the gesture is the design.