1978

“Ansouis” Chair

American, born 1944

Jon Brooks made this “Ansouis” chair early in his career, after a two-month residency in the village of Ansouis in the South of France. The chair’s posture conveys the relaxed lifestyle he experienced while staying there, and records his early exploration of solidity, form, and reduction. It also shows the influence of sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, whose work the young artist found particularly inspiring. Brooks studied woodworking with J. B. Blunk in Northern California in the mid-1970s, and the influence of Blunk’s abstraction is apparent not only in Brooks’s furniture and sculptures, but also in his tools. Brooks used a chainsaw—Blunk’s tool of choice—to create this chair.