157 - Pierre Castignola (born in 1995)

Pierre Castignola (born in 1995) Not a Plastic Chair Armchair Cast bronze, polished 2025 H56 W57 D83 cm 45 kg With *Not a Plastic Chair*, Pierre Castignola subverts the conventions of the one-piece plastic chair, a universal industrial object and symbol of mass production. By casting this familiar form in polished bronze, the artist radically transforms its materiality, weight, and status. The contrast between the object’s apparent banality and the preciousness of bronze transforms this archetypal chair into a true sculptural piece. Its title, *Not a Plastic Chair*, ironically highlights this ambiguity between a functional object, an icon of everyday life, and a work of art. Created in 2025 as a one-of-a-kind piece, this work straddles the line between contemporary art and collectible design. Pierre Castignola has made the one-piece plastic chair—a universal industrial object and symbol of mass production—the central material of his work. With *Not a Plastic Chair*, he takes this reappropriation to its logical conclusion: the familiar form is preserved but transposed into cast and polished bronze, which radically alters its weight, value, and status. The title ironically highlights the ambiguity between a functional object, an icon of everyday life, and a work of art, in an approach reminiscent of ready-mades and Pop Art. Created in 2025 as a one-of-a-kind piece, the work straddles the line between contemporary art and collectible design. The repurposed model has its own history. First conceived in the 1960s by Verner Panton, Joe Colombo, Vico Magistretti, and Helmut Bätzner, the one-piece molded chair did not enter true mass production until after 1972, with the Armchair 300 by French engineer Henry Massonnet, manufactured in less than two minutes by his company Stamp. Because it was not patented, the design was copied around the world, and billions of copies were sold. Critic Alice Rawsthorn compares it to Thonet’s Chair No. 14, and MoMA included it in the 2025 exhibition *Pirouette: Turning Points in Design*. A controversial icon—banned from Basel’s public spaces from 2008 to 2017 and now a symbol of throwaway culture—the Monobloc remains a powerful cultural marker: two of them appear on the cover of Bad Bunny’s *Debí Tirar Más Fotos*, named Album of the Year at the 2026 Grammy Awards. By casting it in bronze, Castignola gives this object—which has no designer and no value—the permanence and status of a sculpture.