In Riemu museums' Chair story exhibition, the chair takes you on a journey through history

Riihimäki City Museum and Riihimäki Art Museum's first joint exhibition The Story of a Chair opens to the public at Riemu Museums on October 12.10.2024, XNUMX. The exhibition on two floors, which fills almost the entire museum, guides the viewer through the centuries and history, presenting chairs, objects and art. The exhibition starts with the edge board of an Egyptian chair belonging to the collections of the Finnish Egyptological Society, which is thousands of years old, and ends with contemporary design chairs.

The exhibition complex, which focuses on chairs, is composed of chairs, antiques and works of art belonging to the collections of the Riihimäki City Museum and the Riihimäki Art Museum. The Chair Story exhibition has been supplemented with chairs and other exhibition material borrowed from other museums' collections, private collections and companies. In addition to private borrowers, the borrowers of chairs include the University of Helsinki, Hyvinkää City Museum, Hämeenlinna City Museum, Lahti Museums, Malmgårdin Manor, Finnish Railway Museum, Tampere Historical Museums and Vepsäläinen Oy. Works by sculptor Maija Vainonen and products from Johanna Gullichsen Oy are also on display.

In the exhibition, priority has been given to the chairs as they are. The exhibition contributes to creating a stylistically historical cross-section of chairs from different eras. It moves forward in a story-like manner, focusing on the atmosphere, mental images and associations and visual entities created by the chairs.

In contemporary design, as well as in revival styles and other earlier stylistic trends, you can see the same form language and decorative motifs as in earlier chairs and furniture. Even today, Huonekaluliikkeit sells different variations and models of chairs, where influences from antiques and chairs from previous decades are evident.

The history, the story, of the chair is long, spanning thousands of years. The period of current planning is only a short, albeit significant, part of that.