in paweł grunert’s world, chairs grow like vines and wicker runs free

while others wove wicker, Paweł grunert set it free

Long before collectible design became a global category, Paweł Grunert was building his own universe from wicker, roots, branches, steel, and imagination. Working from a barn studio outside Warsaw, the Polish designer developed a special body of work, creating chairs, thrones, and sculptural forms, thinking about furniture as a vehicle to tell a story and experiment with space. Today, his legacy lives on through After I’m Gone, I’ll Return in the Form of a Chair, an exhibition at Warsaw’s OBJEKT gallery that brings together historical works alongside the final pieces completed during the last months of his life.

For curator Aleksandra Krasny, founder of OBJEKT gallery, Grunert’s work revealed its singularity from the very beginning. ‘I had never seen anything quite like it,’ she shares with designboom. ‘It possessed a rare quality that I still associate with the best works of art and design — the ability to remain open. The object seemed endlessly capacious in terms of interpretation. It could be read as furniture, sculpture, architecture, fantasy, or all of these things at once.’

A pioneer of Poland’s art furniture movement, Grunert approached wicker in a way beyond conventional understandings of craft. While many designers viewed the material through the lens of weaving and technique, he became fascinated by its behavior as matter. ‘Paweł approached wicker differently from anyone else I have encountered,’ Krasny explains. ‘While others wove it, he released it.’

all images by Tomo Yarmush, unless stated otherwise

chairs that grow like vines

Paweł Grunert often described wicker as a material that appears to have a beginning but no end, capable of expanding into space like a thicket, and he became interested in accumulation, density, growth, and disorder. It was the unpredictability of the material that fascinated him. For the Polish designer, wicker was a way of thinking about freedom and entropy.

His furniture reflects this philosophy. Monumental chairs and thrones are born from dense masses of wicker, often framed by steel structures that contain and reveal the wildness of the material. Throughout his career, he developed a visual language built on contrasts, marrying organic and industrial, soft and rigid, intuitive and engineered. Steel appears as a drawing in space, introducing structural logic while allowing wicker to remain expressive and unruly.

‘What interested him was not the weave itself but the moment when the material escaped the discipline of weaving,’ Krasny notes. Looking at Grunert’s works, that escape becomes visible. His chairs appear to grow as though they have emerged organically from the landscape. It is perhaps unsurprising that the designer once remarked: ‘I dream of fields sown with chairs that grow like vines in France.’

That dream permeates the exhibition, where furniture is featured as static objects; the installation treats the works as protagonists inhabiting their own ecosystem. Some climb walls, others hover beneath the ceiling, while many seem almost animated. Krasny explains that Grunert frequently anthropomorphized his furniture, imagining personalities and stories for individual pieces. One of his most iconic works, Przeciąg (Draft), was described by the designer as a seat that dislikes crowds and secretly travels across the sky when nobody is watching.

historical works and recent pieces trace Grunert’s dialogue between wicker, steel and form

a vision carried through to the very end

The exhibition also carries a deeply personal dimension. Planning began at the end of 2025, around the same time Grunert learned of his illness. Yet even under increasingly difficult circumstances, he remained determined to continue working. According to Krasny, the designer established a makeshift studio within the hospital, reviewing prototypes and discussing structural details with collaborators whenever possible.‘He organized a studio for himself in the hospital ward,’ she recalls. ‘By then, he was no longer physically able to build the works himself, but he remained involved in every detail. Together, we managed to complete three new works.’

Those final pieces are presented alongside works spanning decades of experimentation, revealing the remarkable consistency of Grunert’s vision. Looking back, Krasny sees them as evidence of an artist who never abandoned either his curiosity or his sense of humor. The exhibition title itself comes from a phrase Grunert casually wrote in an email exchange. ‘Without intending to, Paweł had already found the words that would frame the entire project,’ she says.

More than a tribute, the exhibition brings forward Grunert’s lasting contribution to contemporary design. The designer, by transforming a material deeply rooted in Polish craft traditions into a medium of speculation, storytelling, and spatial experimentation, expanded the possibilities of what craft can become.

For Krasny, that legacy remains as relevant as ever. ‘Paweł transformed a material inseparable from Polish craft traditions into something visionary, poetic, humorous, and radically contemporary,’ she tells us. ‘Above all, however, the exhibition became a testament to his persistence, imagination, and generosity.’

a sweeping wicker form recalls the designer’s fascination with growth and movement