benandsebastian have been awarded for their work entitled ‘Completely Dusty’. The Danish Arts’ Foundation justification for the award is given below:

The Committee for Craft and Design has chosen to award a prize to benandsebastian for their work Completely Dusty, which was shown in the SE Association’s exhibition Sculptural Furniture in Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen.

From a distance, this piece looks like what it presumably also is – a quite ordinary cube-shaped stool. Only on closer examination does it reveal its secrets: an almost inestimable wickerwork of rounded square and rectangular partial elements in carved veneer. The workmanship is delicate, not to say masterful, and in this shakily lyrical piece of furniture one can sense the designers’ fascination with for instance the 18th century’s quaint and incredibly time-demanding pieces of craft work such as we know from the Rosenborg collections. But here we see the ultimate contemporary … and thoroughly nerdy piece of furniture. A much needed corrective and – as also emerges from the catalogue text – a commentary on modernist furniture, which has produced an infinite series of variations on its themes and has now come to look pretty worn out. Benandsebastian shows that it is in concentration, in the long period of time spent on the individual work, that one of the many possible ways forward is to be found.