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FRUIT BOWL

date: 2010
design: Thomas Feichtner
type: fruit bowl
material: silver 940/000
size: 170 x 170 x 200 mm
producer: Wiener Silber Manufactur, Austria

Fascinated by the history of Viennese Silver, Thomas Feichtner created a fruit bowl for the renowned Wiener Silber Manufactur. This bowl is not a rounded body, instead, it is a sophisticated interplay of internal and external surfaces. At first glance, it appears as if the fruit might fall out through the openings in the legs, but actually, it becomes wedged and therefore stabilized. This, at one and the same time, is both an intended irritation and its most significant functional element. This way, the interface area between bowl and fruit is kept to a minimum, thus reducing the size of pressure area and potential damage to the fruit. Simply bending the silver sheet produced a self-supporting structure, supported by three legs. Thus, in marked contrast to the organic shapes of the fruit, an almost ‘technical’ effect is achieved, formally pointing to the style of Feichtner’s previous works. 

In its long cultural history, the fruit bowl has, at no time, been a simply functional product, but rather was seen as a sculptural object, - as a kind of mini-architecture. Early in antiquity, fruit bowls represented a central object of table culture, and, up into the Baroque period, remained the subject of the traditional still life. Designers of the Wiener Werkstätten and at the Bauhaus turned the fruit bowl into a theme of the modernism. The enthusiasm of renowned designers and architects for the subject ‘fruit bowl’ to this day has remained unchallenged. Since the heyday of Vienna Silver Craft around 1900 at the latest, fruit bowls fashioned from silver have remained an important feature of Austrian design history. To this very day, the Wiener Silber Manufactur produces bowls by the original drawings of Josef Hoffmann and Otto Prutscher. Apart from this, Thomas Feichtner’s design represents a fully autonomous contemporary approach to a traditional theme.