Saken

Some choices about an object reveal less about taste than about how their owner sees the world. When Parviz Tanavoli, an artist who has spent much of his life thinking about volume, material, and space, chooses a piece from "Sa" for his home, that choice becomes something more than a piece of furniture set in a corner.

A sculptor's eye sees objects differently. Before it registers function, it weighs presence in space: the balance of a form, the sweep of a curve, its relation to the body, the void that forms around it. Perhaps this is where the piece's significance in Tanavoli's home begins.

The chair here isn't placed beside the sculpture just to look artful. Their kinship runs deeper than that. One was made to be looked at, the other to be sat on but both start from the same question: how does material become form?

In this house, Tanavoli's sculptures and the "Sa" piece don't compete. Each keeps its own independence, and it's precisely in that distance that a dialogue opens between them between seeing and touching, between what's made for contemplation and what enters daily life.

After decades of making, looking, and thinking about form, a sculptor has chosen a volume to live not in a museum or a gallery, but in the most private quarter of his life: the home. A place where things are no longer merely seen where we live with them.