magnus pettersen brings sculptural gravitas to copenhagen
Inside The Lab on Vermundsgade in Copenhagen, where the group show ‘another circle’ gathered a field of voices after the design discipline during 3daysofdesign, by Magnus Pettersen sculptural the objects held their place with a dense, mineral presence.
Faces that look like stones, boulder forms and stacked concrete the totems seemed less concerned with easy categorization than with the physical charge of matter itself, asking visitors to look more at the surface, the mass, and the small displacements that occur when crafted the object lies between sculpture and use.
Pettersen’s presentation at Other Circle marks the final point in a tension-based practice. The Norwegian artist, based in Copenhagen, has long worked beyond art and design, shaping objects that bear traces of furniture while resisting the usual obedience of furniture to function. A column may behave like a body, while a table may first be read as a geological fragment.
The works are made through pressure, pigment, weight and hand, with materials that are left to retain their persistent character.
image © Nina Jønler, The Lab Cph
between object and object
Across from Magnus Petersen’s largest work, outside his sculptures at another circle In Copenhagen, abstraction often begins with something blunt and familiar. THE designer binds concrete, reminiscent of the road and construction site. The stone suggests ruins, thresholds and deep time. Steel brings an industrial edge. However, these materials shift under his treatment, taking on color, texture, and a strange kind of personality.
The works can feel archaic at first glance, then suddenly modern in their proportions and finishes, as if fragments of different stories have been compressed into one object.
This friction has also shaped his collaborative practice. In 2015, Pettersen founded studio Pettersen & Hein with Danish furniture designer Lea Hein, building a studio language around concrete, steel, ceramic, wood and painted surfaces.
Their pieces move between furniture and sculptures with an immediacy that feels both playful and weighty. They’ve made stools, mirrors, tables, vases and mesh floor pieces, though the function rarely explains the full object. The use is present, but it arrives after the form, after the texture, and after the first encounter with the color compressed into a mass.
image © Nina Jønler, The Lab Cph
Concrete takes on a new colorful character
Pettersen & Hein’s early works helped turn concrete into a more expressive medium. Instead of treating it as a neutral industrial substance, the duo painted, cast, polished, stacked and interrupted it. Pigment softened its visual harshness without erasing its heaviness.
Metallic elements introduced shine and reflection, while rough edges kept the work close to the natural process that made it. Objects often appear poised on the brink of collapse, giving their geometry a physical charge. Next to Pettersen’s independent sculptural work, this common language opens up into something more elemental.
His recent pieces feel like carved markers or contrived relics, with faces emerging from stone-like volumes and stacked columns rising through color and texture. They sit in a room with the confidence of old things, although their forms are drawn from a modern design vocabulary. This slight confusion is part of their appeal. They make the material feel active, as if concrete and stone still have unfinished roles to play.
image © Nina Jønler, The Lab Cph
a future of slow art
Pettersen’s work offers a different route to material innovation. It’s not just about innovation. Instead, he asks what can happen when familiar substances are approached with new patience, when the maker listens to resistance, density and surface. The vessel is visible in the negotiation between control and accident. It appears in the way that a rough form acquires a polish in one place and retains its bluntness in another.
In Other Circle, this approach felt well placed. The Copenhagen platform brought together practices that operate across fixed disciplines, and Pettersen’s objects used this openness to their advantage. They belonged to drawing, but they also belonged to sculpture. They proposed the utility and then moved away from it.
In a design culture often driven by the capacity for mass production, his work speaks of craft as a forward-looking language, where matter retains its memory and the handcrafted object still has room for resistance.
image © Nina Jønler, The Lab Cph
image © designboom
