magnus pettersen brings sculptural weight to copenhagen
Inside The Lab on Vermundsgade in Copenhagen, where the group show ‘other circle’ gathered a field of post-disciplinary design voices during 3daysofdesign, Magnus Pettersen’s sculptural objects held their ground with a dense, mineral presence.
Stone-like faces, boulder forms, and stacked concrete totems appeared less concerned with easy categorization than with the physical charge of matter itself, asking visitors to look longer at surface, mass, and the small shifts that happen when a crafted object sits between sculpture and use.
Pettersen’s presentation at Other Circle marks the latest point in a practice built around tension. The Norwegian artist, based in Copenhagen, has long worked across the edge of art and design, shaping objects that carry traces of furniture while resisting furniture’s usual obedience to function. A column might behave like a body, while a table might read first as a geological fragment.
Works are crafted through pressure, pigment, weight, and the hand, with materials allowed to keep their stubborn character.
image © Nina Jønler, The Lab Cph
between object and artifact
Across Magnus Pettersen’s larger body of work, outside his sculptures on view at other circle in Copenhagen, abstraction often begins with something blunt and familiar. The designer harnesses concrete, which recalls the street and the building site. Stone suggests ruins, thresholds, and deep time. Steel brings in an industrial edge. Yet these materials shift under his treatment, gaining color, texture, and a strange kind of personality.
The works can feel archaic at first glance, then suddenly contemporary in their proportions and finishes, as if fragments from different histories have been compressed into one object.
This friction has shaped his collaborative practice as well. In 2015, Pettersen founded studio Pettersen & Hein with Danish furniture designer Lea Hein, building a studio language around concrete, steel, ceramic, wood, and pigmented surfaces.
Their pieces move between furniture and sculpture with a directness that feels both playful and heavy. They have made stools, mirrors, tables, vases, and gridded floor pieces, though the function rarely explains the full object. Use is present, but it arrives after form, after texture, and after the first encounter with color pressed into mass.
image © Nina Jønler, The Lab Cph
concrete takes on a colorful new 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 dyed, cast, polished, stacked, and interrupted it. Pigment softened its visual hardness without erasing its weight.
Metal elements introduced shine and reflection, while rough edges kept the work close to the physical process that made it. The objects often appear balanced at the edge of collapse, giving their geometry a bodily charge. Seen beside Pettersen’s independent sculptural work, that shared language opens into something more elemental.
His recent pieces carry the feel of carved markers or invented 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, though their forms come from a contemporary design vocabulary. That slight confusion is part of their appeal. They make material feel active, as if concrete and stone still have unfinished roles to play.
image © Nina Jønler, The Lab Cph
a future of slow craft
Pettersen’s work offers a different route into material innovation. It does not depend on novelty alone. Instead, it asks what can happen when familiar substances are approached with fresh patience, when the maker listens to resistance, density, and surface. The craft is visible in the negotiation between control and accident. It appears in the way a rough form gains polish in one place and keeps its bluntness in another.
At Other Circle, that approach felt well placed. The Copenhagen platform brought together practices working beyond fixed disciplines, and Pettersen’s objects used that openness to their advantage. They belonged to design, but they also belonged to sculpture. They suggested utility, then pulled away from it.
In a design culture often driven by the capacity for mass-production, his work makes a case for craft as a future-facing language where matter keeps its memory and the handmade object still has room to resist.
image © Nina Jønler, The Lab Cph
image © designboom