Erik Chambert – Geometric Art F591

Furniture designer Erik Chambert, in addition to creating functional furniture designs and sophisticated interiors, also created art in which he visualized his impressions and life experiences through an abstract visual language. The current theme auction features 30 works of art by Chambert with provenance from the his family. Erik Chambert worked as the artistic director at the family business, AB Chamberts Furniture Factory in Norrköping. He made his debut as a designer in larger exhibitions at the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930 and then went on to showcase his work in Chicago, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and New York.

Alongside his furniture design, Chambert was also a prominent visual artist in the fields of concrete and abstract art. In the 1920s and 1930s, he often created watercolour sketches of furniture, and by the end of the 1930s, his gouaches began to include fragments of reality and organic, non-representational, flowing forms. In 1943, he made his debut at the Liljevalchs Autumn Salon and was subsequently represented in many of Liljevalchs salons. During the 1950s, Chambert painted entirely abstract works and initially named his paintings with titles such as Composition and numbers or simply capital letters.

From the mid-1960s onwards, he started creating reliefs in white, black, or red paper, silver foil, and gold leaf. His aim was to create tension through spatial effects, allowing the viewer to move in front of the artwork and experience how shadows and nuances enhanced the visual experience. The reliefs were embedded in plexiglass boxes, which became an integral part of the artwork.

Towards the end of the 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the early 1980s, he further experimented with light and light refraction, using only plexiglass in plates and rods, sometimes painted on the top, to intensify the motif.