Jonathan Muecke (pronounced "Mickey”) was trained as an architect and earned his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In his work, he thinks about objects as markers of human scale, and often works with a single material distilled to its fundamental elements. “I like to take things for what they are and not try to imagine what someone intended them to be,” he says.
The objects Jonathan Muecke makes have an internal logic informed by their materiality, their interplay with light, the spaces they’re in, and the people who use them. Over and over, in his Minneapolis workshop, he revisits the functional archetypes of furniture—a chair, a table, a bench—homing in further on the essence of the thing through experiment. Mostly, Muecke uses just one material. Whether working with wood, aluminum or carbon fiber, the varying scales and proportions Muecke employs test the limits of an object’s legibility and actualize its relationship to the body in space. “Designing,” says Muecke, “is a combination of material ambition and a spatial idea.”
Muecke first trained as an architect and interned with Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron before pursuing an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and establishing his own practice. In 2011, Muecke made his debut with a solo exhibition at Chicago’s Volume Gallery. In 2014 he was commissioned to design the architectural pavilion at Design Miami. In 2016, he was invited by Maniera Gallery in Brussels to create objects in response to the Brutalist Van Wassenhove House.
His work is part of many major museum collections, including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques) in France, and the Vitra Design Museum in Germany.
