In Paweł Grunert’s studio, a modest wooden barn tucked into the forests outside of Warsaw, sculptures and furniture built from repurposed reeds and branches spilled out onto the patio and even hung from the ceiling.

Objekt Gallery’s new exhibition mirrors this chaotic scene in an elegant tribute to the late furniture innovator. 

One chair is attached to one sepia-toned wall as if it’s breaking the rules of gravity, its angular steel frame only able to partly contain the long wicker branches that form its seat. Another chair, containing branches that extend so far beyond the metal frame that wicker almost fills the entire room, hangs from the ceiling above sculptural furniture that presents further clashes between refined steel and disorderly branches.

Grunert worked on the exhibition, which is open until July 17, up until his passing in February 2026. At that moment, what was a presentation of new and historical chairs by a radical furniture maker at the forefront of Poland’s design scene suddenly became a retrospective homage to his work.

The Warsaw exhibition, appropriately titled After I'm Gone, I'll Return in the Form of a Chair, largely focuses on wicker, a material Grunert foregrounded because it is “unruly.”

“Wicker has a beginning, but no end. It takes over the space,” the designer once said. “That, after all, is the nature of a thicket. It has no boundaries — framing defines them. When we leave it be, the boundaries fade away again.”

Grunert also worked with other materials, as the exhibition demonstrates with one chair comprising a large, rough-edged, dark stone cube placed inside a curving steel frame, and another where a small, perfectly-formed seat emerges from raggedy tree roots. In almost 40 years of practice, he also produced tables from earth, beds from cereal, and, most famously, a chaise longue from used plastic water bottles presented at the Milanese exhibition ECOTRANSPOP. 

At the core of Grunert’s genius was an eye for turning everything from foraged forest supplies to discarded trash into artful objects. Or, in the case of a stool “growing” from tree roots, downright surreal objects.

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