Julia Lohmann "Waltraud" Cow-Bench 2004

  • MoMA, Floor 2, 216

Lohmann investigates the contradictions in our relationship to animals using offal, off-cuts of leather, and other meat-industry waste products. The Waltraud Cow-Bench is an appropriately cow-shaped upholstered leather bench, a “bovine memento mori,” the designer has said. As lyrical and polemical as her work is, it is always intended to be useful: Waltraud is as comfortable as one dreams a reclining cow would be.

Gallery label from Rough Cut: Design Takes a Sharp Edge, November 26, 2008–October 12, 2009
Additional text

A headless cow? A bench to sit on? Actually, it’s both! Lohmann makes her cow-benches using offcuts of leather, a waste product of the meat industry. She hopes they will help people think about how we use and treat animals. The benches are meant to be thought-provoking, funny, and useful. She names them all; this one is named after her mother!

Gallery label from 2022, for kids
Medium
Leather, foam and wood
Dimensions
25 × 30 × 66" (63.5 × 76.2 × 167.6 cm)
Credit
Fund for the Twenty-First Century
Object number
870.2007
Copyright
© 2022 Julia Lohmann / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Germany
Department
Architecture and Design

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