Designer Of The Year 2023: Muller Van Severen

It took the Flemish Muller Van Severen just over ten years to develop and establish a distinctive artistic language, whose porosity between the creative domains has come to be its trademark. Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen are honored as Designer(s) of the Year 2023 by Maison&Objet, which recognizes this decade of innovations that have upended norms in interior design. The Belgian couple is offering a “cocoon exhibition” for the future edition of the show, which runs from September 7 to 11, which will be presented to them as a special recognition.

Hannes Van Severen and Fien Muller first crossed paths at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. Fien studied photography there, and Hannes studied sculpture. They started working together in 2011 after being so nurtured by the visual arts and endowed with a deep grasp of plasticity. The fusional couple now resides in Evergem, a little village outside of Ghent, where they produce an egalitarian style. Muller Van Severen combines the vocabularies of the decorative, graphic, and plastic arts to obfuscate the boundaries between the intimate. This is done somewhere between the radical Bauhaus of Marcel Breuer and the visionary functionalism of Charlotte Perriand.

“We wanted to recreate a landscape representing the main elements of our daily life: our house, workshop and garden. Three islands will recompose, in the middle of the fair, our little oasis in the Evergem desert. The exhibition will act as a global and immersive installation where our pieces will exist as many small autonomous architectural entities. It will be a mirror of our interior but also our mind”

The stand, which resembles a hanging bubble, therefore reveals a panorama of Muller Van Severen’s experiments and material and color experimenting. Their “furniture sculptures” which are actually several tiny independent constructions that respond to one another in their formal purity, consistently demonstrate this unique approach insofar as each one invites a fresh sensory experience of the object. The Future Primitive collection, a pioneering series dominating the Muller Van Severen characteristic style: essential minimalism where sobriety, utility, and collectible design rhyme, repeated these colors by touches. The pair offers shelves in a variety of combinations and heights for Maison&Objet Paris, combining deck chairs and floor lamps within the frames.

Muller Van Severen is utilizing Maison&Objet Paris to present two new carpets exclusively in France that were created for the industry leader in upholstery textiles, Kvadrat, and which created a sensation at the previous Salone Del Mobile in Milan. The two models with the names “March” and “July,” whose shapes and finishes are modeled after the various phases of a sheep’s natural shearing, share a special manufacturing process.

Muller Van Severen enhances an already well-regarded partnership by showcasing new works exclusively for Maison&Objet, most of which were created for the Danish brand HAY. Muller van Severen offers objects that are exhibited as much as they are experienced and lived, being able to find their proper place in the white cube of a gallery as well as in the private comfort of a living room. This constant concern to probe all the corners of the fields of sculpture as much as of design, free from all academicism.