Fat Chair

Joseph Beuys's 'Fat Chair' ('Fettstuhl'), first made in 1964 and repeated in several versions through to the 1980s, places a triangular wedge of pork fat on an ordinary wooden chair. Drawing on Beuys's mythologised biography — his downed plane in the Crimea in 1943, where, he said, Tatar tribesmen wrapped him in fat and felt to save his life — fat became in his work a substance of warmth, healing, and transformation. Resting on the humble seat of a 'social sculpture', the organic, temperature-sensitive material fuses the domestic object with a lifelong meditation on the human body as a vessel of spiritual energy.