jurgen bey
Jurgen Bey came to prominence in the late 1990s with a series of products for Droog Design. His Tree Trunk Bench – a tree trunk with three bronze chair backs plugged into it – epitomized what might now be called the Droog School by taking traditional furniture and subverting your expectations of it with a visual gag. In this case, the joke was nature literally sprouting culture. Seeing beauty in very common things, Bey is the father of the current tendency to appropriate objects and turn them into different objects. Bey’s key works – the bench, the Light Shade Shade and the Kokon furniture – were all conceived in one particularly inspired year, 1999. The Light Shade Shade, a chandelier sheathed in a polyester cylinder, is another jibe at our expectations. The cylinder is lined with a translucent foil – “It’s what they use for interrogations,” says Bey, referring to its use in two-way mirrors – so that it looks like a sleek piece of modernism until you switch the light on.