Friedman Benda is pleased to present Wendell Castle: A New Vocabulary, a solo exhibition of the late American designer Wendell Castle (1932-2018).

Throughout a celebrated career spanning six decades, Castle introduced new ways of looking at, thinking about, and making furniture. In doing so, he created a new sculptural vocabulary that defied categorization and became the cornerstone of his practice. Wendell Castle: A New Vocabulary brings together rare, early, formative pieces with key works from the last decade of Castle’s long career, during which time he realized a body of work of critical importance and boundless ambition. Both periods are represented by seminal works that are exemplary achievements of the decades that bookend the unparalleled oeuvre of one of America’s most iconic figures in design.

With his pioneering innovation of stack lamination, Castle was able to compose volumes without being constrained by the inherent limitations of his signature material, wood. The exhibition will include arguably the most important example using stack lamination, Environment for Contemplation (1970), created for the Museum of Contemporary Crafts’ Contemplation Environments exhibition that same year. Four decades later Castle combined the laminating process with 21st century technological advancements allowing him to realize bodies of work not possible with traditional handcraftsmanship alone.

“Throughout Castle’s career, he created new vocabularies of form, as well as the means to realize them. That he did so in the seemingly restrictive context of furniture design makes his achievement all the more remarkable. He was able to rethink functional objects – tables, chairs, cabinets – into wholly unprecedented gestural compositions,” states Glenn Adamson, Yale senior scholar, contributor to the Wendell Castle Catalogue Raisonne, and former Director of the Museum of Arts and Design.

Building on the gallery’s presentation of important works by Castle at TEFAF this May, this exhibition explores Castle’s legacy of constant reinvention that defined his approach and allowed him to achieve inventive forms and sculptural volumes. Wendell Castle: A New Vocabulary will be accompanied by a digital catalogue with an introductory essay and texts by Glenn Adamson.