In Giorgio de Chirico’s 1927 painting Mobili nella Valle, an arrangement of furniture is dropped, rather surrealistically, into a desert landscape. Some 40 years after its creation, this strange, metaphysical scene would inspire Italian sculptor Mario Ceroli to realize the three objects from the artwork—a cabinet, an armchair, and a tall-backed seat—in planks of Russian pine.
The throne-like Sedia Alta, Italian for High Chair, swiftly became the most recognizable piece of the bunch, making its debut as part of the scenography Ceroli developed for performances of Shakespeare’s Richard III at Teatro Stabile di Torino in 1968. By the early 1970s it was put into production by the radical Italian design brand Poltronova.
“For me, furniture is a sculpture created to be touched, to be used,” says the artist, who lives with several iterations of the chair in his own Rome studio and home, which will open to the public as a museum at the end of 2025. Placed in a domestic context, the unusual form delivers the same uncanny effect that it does in de Chirico’s painting. Take, for example, Ico Parisi’s space-age-y 1970s Casa Fontana, in Lake Como, where the chairs gather round a slick, lacquered dining table like objects from another time and place. Meanwhile in a Paris house by AD100 designer Pierre Yovanovitch, a single Sedia adds a dreamlike quality to a bedroom-office.
