Muller Van Severen, an atelier of furniture design

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“10 Years Muller Van Severen. In Dialogue with the Collection”, Design Museum Gent - Photo Bart Van Leuven

To mark their first ten years on the design scene, the Belgian duo’s collaborations and projects are burgeoning in a perfect blend of artistic sensibility and superb design. The interview.

With their understated yet vivid designs displaying a laser-sharp eye for combining materials and colors, Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen are attracting the attention of a growing number of galleries and furniture brands, establishing a style that has become iconic. Over the last decade they have formed a couple both privately and professionally, creating a powerful artistic relationship. Before meeting, Fien Muller enjoyed a career as a photographer, while Hannes Van Severen was a sculptor. They have successfully leveraged their respective talents to create unfussy designs that are always functional, and reflect an empirical approach and pliable sensibility. The Design Museum of Gent has just inaugurated an important retrospective featuring the couple ("10 Years Muller Van Severen", running until 6 March 2022), while the publishing house Walther König is putting out a book ("Muller Van Severen: Dialogue") featuring the pair’s most significent projects and collaborations. Besides self-productions and limited editions, the duo Muller Van Severen seems today to be leaning increasingly towards industrial design, embedding their innate and joyfully minimalist attitude also into mass production.

You are celebrating ten years since the opening of your studio with an exhibition and a book. What has this journey back through your projects given you? An opportunity to capture a nuance of your work that has remained implicit, or to focus on the direction in which you will be heading in the future?

Both. It gives a clear look back at how we have been working. An overview of groups of objects we have made over time. It's an investigation. And it turns out that we have our own identity that always returns. We concentrate on certain materials that we make families of objects with. In retrospect, it is always clear that there is a connection between everything we make. We remain inspired and new groups will emerge. The urge is still there to show our vision of the objects around us. The trigger can be a question for a project, exhibition or just a material that inspires us. The modus operandi will probably never differ much from that in our early days.

The exhibition that opens at the Design Museum Gent is conceived as a dialogue with the great masters in the collection. How did this curatorial choice come about and how did you organize this process of resonance between your pieces and their works? Are there also designers you are most inspired by?

The museum has to close for two years due to a major renovation. The management wanted to show the collection one more time but also have an exhibition with our work. In the old salons we showed an overview of our work linked to 10 people and 10 moments that have been important in our journey. In the large hall of 1992, we made a large installation with large sheets of colored paper to divide a large space interestingly. The large sheets of paper become both walls and pedestals and flow into each other. The connection to the space is always important to us. We have created about 20 different scenes where our work stands together with collection pieces in a "for us" surprising way. The choice was rather intuitive and not necessarily aimed at similarities in time, material or style, but rather in terms of a sense of kinship. There are many pieces we love, but not necessarily all linked to one designer.

Your backgrounds are both artistic. How does this specificity affect your approach to design?

We work quickly in 1/1 scale. We cut saws and folds, weld saws grind until an interesting world emerges. We love Solid materials and surprising combinations. How a new design relates to a space and to another object. So different objects are created and the different objects form a family of objects that together form a kind of installation or a landscape in space.

During the last Salone del Mobile in Milan you presented a new collection of carpets for cc-tapis, Ombra. How did you give back?

Making compositions with pieces of paper was the starting point, the shadows that play along were equally important and are also surfaces. In this way, depth is automatically created. We literally copied the photos of those compositions onto carpet.

In recent years, your projects have moved more frequently from limited editions to mass production, as with your collaborations with Valerie Objects, Reform or Hay. An opportunity or also a challenge with different times, organizations, and project needs?

Each object regardless of reproduction numbers, we try to interpret with the same sculptural approach. With feeling for material, color and shape. Sometimes a material or finish lends itself better to a mass product than to an edition. But an object made for a large edition must be able to stand next to a limited object without shame.

Looking ahead to the next ten years, is there a particularly ambitious project you would like to devote yourself?

We want to continue to create new exhibitions with new families of objects. Looking for interesting combinations of materials. But also collaborations with furniture companies can charm us. We have now done a lot in a short time. We'll see what's next.