Incollect Magazine - Issue 11

Incollect Magazine 25 Todd Merrill is proud to say he is the one who ‘discovered’ Markus Haase. But he also admits it didn’t happen in the usual way he finds talented makers in the world of contemporary design. It was 2014, and Haase, a 33-year-old German stone sculptor living in New York, was working on a construction site in SoHo to pay the bills. On a lunch break, he saw some unusual furniture in the window of Merrill’s Bleeker Street gallery. “I found him lying on the floor under a table,” the dealer recalls, with a wry laugh. “When I asked him what on earth he was doing he remarked, ‘looking at how it is made.’” Haase told Merrill he was a sculptor and could make anything he had in the showroom. In response, Merrill, slightly annoyed by what he thought was arrogance, challenged Haase to make a table. “Two weeks later he showed up at the gallery with a prototype for a new side table made of laminated, expertly carved stone and wood,” Merrill recalls. He was so impressed he took the table to his booth at a fair at the New York Park Avenue Armory and immediately sold it. By the end of the fair he had orders for more. “That was my first commission as a designer and maker of furniture,” says Haase. Haase’s little table for Merrill was titled the “Crossover” table for its fluid combination of interlocking pieces of curved laminated stone and wood. “It is still commissionable,” says Merrill, who just returned from the Nomad Fair in St. Moritz, where he showed Haase’s Sthenos blackened console with bronze feet, as well as his Cloud III chandelier in bronze and onyx. Among sales in progress from the fair is a commission by a private client for a new lighting design. Haase is exclusively represented by Merrill worldwide and most often, these days, he works on commission — right now he is working on a lighting commission for the cinema of a megayacht. The difference with Markus is that he came to furniture and lighting design with 25 years of experience as a sculptor, and he can make anything.” — Todd Merrill Markus Haase, Bleached Ash and Onyx Chandelier, USA, 2017; Bronze, Walnut, and Limestone Dining Table, USA, 2018 ; Faceted Bronze Dining Chair, USA, 2018 . Photo: Simon Leung. Courtesy of Todd Merrill Studio.