Neue Nationalgalerie

At the Neue Nationalgalerie, I wanted to explore the idea that restraint does not necessarily mean muted color. Within the extraordinary scale and visual quiet of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, highly saturated color could exist in very small, deliberate quantities and still feel entirely at ease. A selection of historic and contemporary Knoll pieces was composed through moments of intense blue, oxblood and yellow, set against the building’s glass, steel, marble and veneer.
The placement and scale of the furniture responded directly to the building’s rigorous grid, using its underlying order to establish both the position of individual pieces and the proportions of the larger groupings.The architecture became the measure: its vast neutral field allowed individual pieces of furniture to carry an unusual degree of chromatic intensity.This idea is central to my approach to color and material—not reducing intensity, but controlling its proportion. Saturation becomes some-thing spatial: its effect is determined not simply by the color itself, but by how much of it exists, what surrounds it, and the distance from which it is experienced.