WILMINGTON, DE.- The Delaware Art Museum presents Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker, featuring 52 one-of-a-kind sculptural chairs created by one of the foremost contemporary studio furniture makers in America, on view June 28 – September 21, 2008. Bennett is inspired by well-known furniture designers and architects such as Gerrit Rietveld and Frank Lloyd Wright, causing his wit and imagination to come to life with such chairs as Great Granny Rietveld and Wiggle Wright. By using bold new forms and constantly expanding traditional boundaries, Bennett makes furniture a form of art. Each chair incorporates precious materials, such as rosewood and yellow satinwood, with unconventional materials, including plywood, aluminum, brass, plastic, and paint.

“Garry Knox Bennett’s sense of humor is immediately infectious, but it belies an incredible technical virtuosity which demands a second, closer look,” said Margaretta S. Frederick, Curator at the Delaware Art Museum.

Beyond the 52 chairs that are part of Call Me Chairmaker, a newly created chair is going on view at the exhibition’s entrance. The Delaware Art Museum commissioned Garry Knox Bennett to craft a piece inspired by The Arming of a Knight, 1856 – 57, a chair made by William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti that is part of the Museum’s Pre-Raphaelite collection. Bennett’s new work is titled Was Madox Brown Here?, an irreverent reference to the artist Ford Madox Brown, who was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites but not an original member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Arming of a Knight has been moved from the Pre-Raphaelite galleries to be displayed beside Was Madox Brown Here? during the run of Call Me Chairmaker.

“A good joke is better than bad art,” said Garry Knox Bennett. “To understand my art, a viewer has to understand jokes. Good jokes build piece by piece, the little fact that is dropped into the story line, the accumulation of illogical data that flip-flops logic until the unexpected is understood with a joyful rush of logic and justice. The best of jokes gives clues so that you understand the joke just three beats after the teller gives you the punch line.”

Most of the chairs in the exhibit are functional; however, several operate more as symbols than actual seats. Comfort would be impossible; sitting down is even a stretch. All 52 chairs are sculptural in quality and each one will awaken a different emotion for the viewer.

One example is Great Granny Rietveld, a creative take-off on the 1934 ZigZag Chair designed and built by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld. Bennett’s version does the unthinkable by design standards, wrapping a retro delicate floral-pattern upholstery around an ultra modern hard-edge functionalist design. Another homage to Rietveld is the Wing Chair, where Bennett has added metallic wings as a pun on the classic colonial wing-back chair—modernism meets colonial Williamsburg.

Bennett studied painting and sculpture at the California College of Arts in Oakland, California. In the 1960s, he used the skills he learned by creating metalwork sculpture to found a metal plating business, specializing in handmade jewelry. In the 1970s, he began building clocks and then expanded into furniture-making. In 2001, he had a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City. Bennett is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Oakland Museum of California, as well as in many private collections.