Trained as a silversmith, Marc Newson worked primarily with metal in the years after he began designing furniture in the mid-1980s. The types of pieces he envisioned from the outset were smooth, seamless, flowing metal forms, like sculptural pieces of jewelry on a large scale. Lacking the technical expertise to achieve this effect, he used sheets of riveted aluminum to approximate it. After the third and last of these very memorable riveted works, the Lockheed Lounge of 1988, he experimented with wood, wicker, and fiberglass before returning to aluminum, in 1992, with the Event Horizon Table. Working with coachbuilders in Sydney, Paris, and finally London, at last he achieved the result he had been looking for from the start: aluminum that looked as if it were a soft, bendable material, seamlessly stretched and warped.

For the Wormhole exhibition in Milan the following year, Newson revisited this technique a second time to produce the Orgone Lounge. As with many of Newson’s most iconic and successful pieces, the Orgone is the culmination of several ideas touched upon in previous works. Its forms are a mashup of the unreleased Coil Chair, the Felt Prototype Chair, the fiberglass Orgone Lounge (all, 1989) and the Wicker Lounge (1990). Like pieces of a conceptual puzzle, Newson took apart these works and used various parts to create the fully and elegantly realized forms of the aluminum Orgone Lounge. The “body” is a streamlined version of those of the Coil and the Felt Prototype chairs, while the feet hark back to the fiberglass Orgone with a nod to the black hole theme of the Event Horizon Table: they look as if they have been sucked right out of the bottom of the structure.

The Orgone Lounge, of which the present lot is number three of six, takes the very concept of a “lounge” to the extreme. With a narrowed waist and curvaceous hips and torso, its supine figure is as inviting as it is intimidating. The sleek aluminum skin wraps around the entire exterior of the lounge in a seamless, uninterrupted surface, while the lacquered orange interior gives volume and shape to the void within. The result is a stunning vision of sensual, futuristic bliss.

ALISON CASTLE