arne quinze

As a young, rootless teenager, Belgian Arne Quinze felt called to be a graffiti artist, until one day he decided to break out of artistic (and illegal) anonymity and devote himself to design, and with it to three-dimensional art. In 1999 he created the ‘Primary Pouf’, a piece of seating so simple that it could easily be read as a ‘raised middle finger’ to the rest of the design world. Made from a special cold-cure foam that Arne Quinze patented in his own name, this cube laid the foundation for the design company Quinze & Milan, where Arne Quinze is still creative director today and designs most of its many collections.

Even the fiercely critical international trade press hailed Arne Quinze as the ‘popstar of furniture’ and the ‘bad boy of the design world’: “a bit of punk, but also a bit of Prada”, and Quinze & Milan was soon celebrated as the darling of European design groups. When Arne Quinze first heard about the ‘die kunstbar’ project in Cologne, he was instantly taken with the building’s highly idiosyncratic architecture. U, which will be presented to the public for the very first time on 14 November 2008.