Design  
26 October 2017
Design  
119

Constantin Boym

The Swing coffee table

Russia/USA, 2006
ready-made oil painting on linen, maple plywood, maple 18 h × 44 w × 22 d in (46 × 112 × 56 cm)
estimate: $5,000–7,000
result: $5,938
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This work is unique. It was created for The Ultimate Art Furniture collection for Moss, New York. The table top features a ready-made oil painting–a copy of The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1767. Signed and dated to underside: [Constantin Boym 06].
provenance: Collection of the artist
exhibited: Telling Tales: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design, 2009, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

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With his Ultimate Art Furniture, Constantin Boym uses the painted canvas—in this case exuberant, heartfelt renditions of Baroque religious-themed masterworks, as a ‘new material’, Art, with which to construct furniture. In response (or as retaliation?) to the Art World’s appropriation of Design, wherein a wooden chair, for example, is placed on a pedestal and subsequently experienced as abstract sculpture, Boym reverses the process: Art is torn from the wall, ripped from its frame, and wrought—albeit most respectfully and sensitively—into what we now experience as a chair or a table. Constantin Boym’s project questions an age-old division between art and design. Is a painting taken off its frame, still art? And if becomes furniture, what is the critical difference between the two fields?

Murray Moss

Constantin Boym b. 1955

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Constantin Boym was born in Moscow, Russia in 1955. He graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute before attending the Domus Academy in Milan where he earned his Master’s Degree in Design in 1985. The following year Boym founded Boym Partners Inc in New York. From 1987 to 2000, Boym was a teacher and program coordinator for Parsons School of Design, New York and in 2010 he became Professor and Director of Graduate Design Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar.

Boym Partners has designed products for Alessi, Swatch and Flos as well as showrooms for Vitra and exhibition displays for museums. Their works have won numerous awards including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in 2009, eight Annual Design Awards from ID Magazine and two Federal Design Achievement Awards. Boym has been the subject of two retrospectives and two books. Objects designed by Boym Partners can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Auction Results Constantin Boym

Constantin Boym

Missing Monument prototypes, collection of twenty

estimate: $20,000–30,000

result: $35,000

Constantin Boym

collection of twenty-five original models for the Buildings of Disaster series

estimate: $15,000–20,000

result: $20,320

Constantin and Laurene Boym

Missing Monuments, collection of twenty-one works

estimate: $5,000–7,000

result: $16,380

Constantin and Laurene Boym

Thirty-six Souvenirs from Missing Monuments and Buildings of Disaster series

estimate: $3,000–5,000

result: $12,500
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