'Kuramura Pollock (Ocean)', a Unique Armchair Handcrafted by Ayala Serfaty

This 'Kuramura Pollock (Ocean)' armchair is a unique piece handcrafted by Ayala Serfaty featuring a deep green and white pattern and evoking Jackson Pollock’s drippings. World-renowned for her ‘SOMA’ series (her "clouds"), Ayala Serfaty has developed since 2010 a collection of seats made of wool, linen and silk fibres which she carefully gathers from all over the world. Work by the artist is notably included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.

Like a painter mixes paint on a pallet, Ayala Serfaty handcrafts a unique felt for each piece to create custom colours and textures. The materiality of textile came to inform her work from its very beginning. “I started out with felt when I went to a Joseph Beuys exhibition in London in 1985. Now I produce it myself. I was trained as a painter and for me, the value of felt – historically, culturally, and artistically – means that I can treat it like a painting or a sculpture. First, I sculpt the polyurethane foam over the metal structure. Next I figure out the shape of the garment so that it will totally cover it. I don’t cut a piece of fabric – I make the entire cover in one piece. Each one is unique, and with no fitting. I make the colours I need, mixing silk with wool and linen in different percentages”.

The series of sensual and protective felt chairs, armchairs and benches is called ‘RAPA’ (‘the healer’ in Hebrew). The name echoes the idea so dear to Joseph Beuys who claimed to have been treated and healed during WWII by this material. Each featuring a unique organic pattern, these seats of singular beauty and consummate comfort defy categorisation while bringing to mind rocky soil, bird plumage, and animal hides. Visually rough but infinitely soft to the touch, they succeed in blurring the usual sensitive frontiers while asserting the physical and terrestrial character of life.

Since the 1990s, Ayala Serfaty has forged a unique path in the world of contemporary design, translating the structural and aesthetic qualities of the natural world into three-dimensional objects. Her conceptual furniture and lighting, every piece unique, have been described by experts as ‘multi-disciplinary’, a ‘fusion of art, craft and design’, and as dispelling the line between nature and abstraction. Her approach focuses on ancient traditions, striving to revive their spirit and energies in an unorthodox, unexpected and innovative manner.

Ayala Serfaty was born in Tel Aviv in 1962. She is a graduate in Fine Arts of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and of Middlesex Polytechnic in London. She lives and works in Tel Aviv. For over twenty years, she has exhibited in museums worldwide such as the London Design Museum, the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, just to name a few. Her work is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums in the US: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Museum of Arts and Design, NY, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Mint Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Indianapolis Museum of Art.