In the world of design, some objects simply occupy space. Others disrupt it. Julia Lohmann’s Cow Bench (2005, €8,000 / €12,000) clearly belongs to the latter category: a leather bench that, beneath its sagging silhouette, evokes less a piece of furniture than an animal. In this case, a cow lying down, headless. Julia Lohmann chooses to restore to the material its lost animality. The piece, produced in thirty editions, presents itself as a walking paradox, a functional piece of furniture on which one quickly no longer feels much desire to sit. Beneath the stretched hide, the designer sculpted a foam form that hints at ribs, a spine, muscles. Nothing deeply anatomical—simply the suggestion of a body.
The effect is immediate: one caresses the surface even before daring to sit on it. Lohmann generates empathy through sight and touch to provoke genuine awareness. The Cow Bench reveals our ability to forget the chain of transformations that connects the animal to the finished product. Leather has entered our homes as a decorative given: sofa, bag, armchair—the material presents itself as a sign of comfort or luxury. Julia Lohmann reopens the wound. She literally places the skin back on a body. And this gesture alone is enough to destabilize the fiction of an innocuous material that has lost all traces of the living.
Each piece carries a name—this one, Yolanda. Julia Lohmann returns to the cow an identity that industry and consumers deny it. This is neither militant nor accusatory, but it encapsulates a reality. Moreover, the work does not display spectacular violence; rather, it shows the calm that settles when one finds oneself alone, in one’s living room, with what one has acquired. This is perhaps where the power of this committed piece lies—both furniture and sculpture that questions society.
Finally, the artist not only interrogates the material; she questions the distance we establish—feigning innocence or forgetfulness—toward what we use. She does not condemn; she highlights. And what we see is not always comfortable. At a time when design is sometimes reduced to disembodied minimalism, Julia Lohmann reminds us that an object can still be a body. One may find this beautiful or disturbing. That is precisely the point. And perhaps, through a hesitant caress, finally understand what it means to “consume the living.”
