Please Feel Free to Sit on the Art

Welcome to Sitting Pretty, a column that explores how timeless design and contemporary culture shape our homes today.

When Los Angeles artist Michael McGregor moved into a new studio in 2021, he was greeted by four mahogany chairs the former tenant left behind. He wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the hand-me-downs, nor their unattractively upholstered cushions, but he didn’t want to get rid of them either. So McGregor turned lemons into lemonade, or rather, he reupholstered the seats with canvas and painted them whenever he needed a break from his other work. One cushion featured a lone crocodile; another the unliking pairing of a simple citrus fruit and a rotund lobster. Every several months, he swapped in a fresh canvas cushion and painted something new, never overthinking it, a practice he still follows today.

Earlier this year, he decided to up the ante and took his brush to a secondhand Barcelona chair and ottoman. When painting one of the most famous chairs ever designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (not to mention one with a sticker price of $8,134), the stakes suddenly feel higher. By doing so, McGregor entered a medium that few artists have dared to explore: modifying and painting furniture that many design enthusiasts regard as gospel.

McGregor was well-acquainted with the Barcelona chair and its place within the design canon before adding his acrylic paint to nearly every square inch of its leather. His grandmother purchased an authentic production in the 1960s, and the chair has remained a family heirloom since. "I always wondered what struck her about the chair, why she was so drawn to that particular design. When she passed, my mother inherited it, and I grew up with it in our house," he says. (When he was in his early thirties, his mother gifted it to him.) "It’s a modern but timeless design, and it has a deep sentimental family history for me."

As McGregor was finishing a body of work for his last exhibition, he reached a point where he says he "needed a clean slate." He had been thinking about painting on a white Barcelona chair and decided to finally go for it. ("I couldn’t touch the one I have for sentimental reasons," he explains.) He found a local vintage dealer with one in stock, and it was delivered to his studio that same night. McGregor started painting at midnight, and a few days later, the piece was complete. With its neat square of leather, the Barcelona’s design lent itself to what McGregor calls his "tile" painting style, taking inspiration from vintage bathroom tiles and old nautical flags. He’s worked within the format for several years, painting canvases as sprawling as nearly four feet wide. (He’s also painted the style on a Hermès box.) McGregor’s bold, colorful tiles fit the Mies van der Rohe design like a glove.

Almost two decades prior, on the opposite coast, New York abstract artist Jim Oliveira "painted" an Eames rocking armchair using his wonderfully idiosyncratic "Color Pile" technique. He mixed acrylic gloss with ink and pigment, poured it to produce irregular circular shapes, and then once they dried, he cut them to affix to canvas. "At the time, I always had Eames fiberglass chairs in my studio because I thought they were beautiful, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you could still find them in junk shops and thrift stores," Oliveira explains. "But the ones I collected all had condition issues, so I didn’t feel guilty repurposing them and giving them new life." The glossy finish that Oliveira added elevated the familiar Eames silhouette into something one might see on a Memphis Group–inflected acid trip.

Perhaps the most famous art-ified Eames chair came from the hand of artist and longtime New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg. In 1950, Steinberg visited the Eames office in Venice Beach and drew directly on several pieces of Eames furniture: a sleeping cat on one fiberglass armchair, a curly-haired nude woman on another. Charles and Ray Eames proudly displayed the work in their office for years. A limited-edition production of the Steinberg Cat Eames chair was released earlier this year. (The chair has since sold out, but a catalog of the Eames Institute’s Steinberg Meets the Eameses online exhibition is still available.)

McGregor, Oliveira, and Steinberg all share a deep reverence for the chairs they picked to work with. It seems that artists have an impulse to grow bored of the two-dimensional canvas and yearn to mark up whatever objects are in arm’s reach. The act of painting on furniture—sometimes controversially—has long been a staple of creative DIYers, too. Designs by the Eameses or Mies van der Rohe are works of art; adding paint or pigment elevates the chairs into something even more eye-catching. 

"I don’t like to fuck with perfect design, so it’s always a little strange to start painting on these objects. It feels a bit like desecrating something," says McGregor. "You have to get over that feeling, which usually happens when a chair finds you, rather than the other way around." 

Top Image: Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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