Surplus Series - Furniture

Permitting the slow and instinctive development of her work trajectory is what Birgitte Due Madsen calls the “elongated project”. This has lead to the creation of various corresponding projects often stemming from the same classic disciplines and methods. Building on this approach, the latest work by Due Madsen is a project based on the pertinent idea of polychromy. Polychromy has been known since antiquity, where sculptors and architects used a variety of colors to bring life into their artwork, to resemble the world around them. The new project, which will be presented during Milan Design Week 2021, is a series of scalable furniture pieces and sculptures exclusively made in collaboration with boutique natural stone and design brand SolidNature.

Surplus has been created entirely from SolidNature’s off-cuts and the specification of each piece (whether furniture or sculpture) is made on the premises of the material and the final composition of each piece will be defined by the stones available.
To mirror Birgitte’s wider body of work, the designs reflect her minimalist and subtle aesthetic, the lines and angles of the furniture pieces will serve purposes of both strength as well as the aesthetic composition, and the variegated colors link back to her work in polychromy. The outcome of this beautiful collaborative process is a direct reflection of the synergy that exists between both Due Madsen and SolidNature.

The slats and bearing counterparts in the multicolored furniture pieces are made of up to 12 types of different onyx. All the stones are remnants, so both color and opacity vary greatly from piece to piece.
The beauty arises in the fusion between the austere Nordic design and the great variety of the stones. A rhythmical scale of color, opacity and density defines the strong graphic lines of the chair and accentuate the rounding of the slats.