Take a seat! This online magazine is dedicated to the wackiest chairs out there

Before setting up the glorious online magazine Chair of Virtue, Adam Maryniak moved from Kraków to London to study product design – finding himself on a straight path to becoming an industrial designer. The creative trained as a fabricator for window installations, then moved into the world of set design, making scenery and props for all sorts.

Despite being a very skilled pragmatic designer and maker he’d always been drawn in by the decorative, narrative and impractical. “Growing up in Kraków, due to its bohemian spirit, I’ve always had an interest in stories, myths and meanings depicted through art,” Adam says. “I’d been looking for an outlet that merges utility and art for some time but it was around five years ago that things became clear, and I started being seriously interested in sculptural furniture.”

So, in 2020, the designer started to collate the research he’d been conducting to inform his own practice into something bigger. Inspired by platforms such as @art_as_chairs and @igotathingforchairs, Adam created his own online gallery to share an ongoing edit of some of the finest sculptural chairs, ones that “haven’t been widely seen but definitely deserved recognition”, and Chair of Virtue was born.

The Instagram gallery has displayed over 1,100 works since its first post. Initially, all of the chairs included were the designer’s finds, but over time, submissions have played a big role in building up the collection. Each chair sits somewhere at the “intersection between art and design”, shares Adam – seats that “challenge conventional form whilst highlighting innovative material use and processes” both by emerging and established designers alike.

Some of the chairs have hands, not just legs, others are made entirely out of stone. Many look like they would make a stable seat, but others might not stand a chance, but what interests Adam most about chairs across the board is their ability to have “a human-like presence”, he says. “Even the language we use to describe them – legs, seats, backs, arms, sometimes even headrests – shapes our perception and makes them somehow close to us, like an animal.” The more sculptural chairs get, the more potential there might for this connection - a human likeness to be discovered or a fondness of their forms.

They’re also objects that we all have a history with of course, that have existed across all phases of our lives: “We form subconscious connections with them, remembering the ones we grew up with, sometimes even getting attached”, Adam says. “Symbolically, chairs carry meaning: offering a seat is welcoming, a high seat represents power, an empty chair signifies absence, and a waiting chair holds emotions. Beyond all that, chairs are an enduring design subject, balancing innovation, craftsmanship, self-expression, and function.”

Amongst all of their multifaceted modes and meanings, Adam had to put some rules and regulations for the archive. Where do you draw the line? At what point does a chair become a sculpture or a sculpture become a chair? Well to this, Adam responds: “For something to be a chair, it must function as one – providing relative comfort, support, and the ability to bear weight. Proportion matters: if a seat is too wide, it’s a bench; too high or low, it’s useless therefore not a chair. A backrest is essential, of course, otherwise, it’s a stool.” So while you can play around with structure, scale and form, a certain criteria must be met, no matter how wacky the seats (or thrones) get.

For Adam, it‘s also important to take these chairs out from behind our screens and display them in their rightful 3D form. He’s so far organised two Chair of Virtue group exhibitions with the help of some friends, with a third show currently in the works. “There are a few exciting new directions in mind,” he says “but I won’t spoil them!” The goal now is to keep growing and evolving the collection in years ahead. One key takeaway from the project? “Anything can be a chair if you arrange it accordingly.”