Muller Van Severen celebrate their 15th anniversary with Apartamento in Milan: a new book and a special exhibition

To mark fifteen years of practice, Muller Van Severen teams up with Apartamento for a new monographic book (titled A Lot of Work) and a special exhibition (titled Silhouettes: Celebrating 15 Years) during Salone del Mobile in Milan. The exhibition is presented in partnership with Tim Van Laere Gallery (Antwerp–Rome).

After years of friendship and collaboration between the Belgian design studio Muller Van Severen and Apartamento — the interior magazine that grew into a publishing house producing books and organizing projects — this moment marks both a publication and an exhibition. Both projects celebrate fifteen years of shared practice while also reflecting on the period preceding the founding of Muller Van Severen in 2011.

The monograph, edited by Nicolás Barreto and Nacho Alegre, reveals both the distinctiveness of their individual trajectories and their unique visual language as Muller Van Severen. By presenting their individual and collaborative works side by side, the book highlights the shared sensibility at the core of their practice: a deep attention to form, space, and the transformation of the everyday.

Building on the book, the exhibition presents 15 unique, life-sized aluminum candlesticks during Salone del Mobile 2026. Each form is an abstract reinterpretation of recurring motifs in the work of Muller Van Severen, alongside shapes that emerged from the earlier individual practices of Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen: chairs, cabinets, lamps, vases, and sculptural structures.

The exhibition

Apartamento presents Silhouettes: Celebrating 15 years, ​
​an exhibition by Muller Van Severen. ​
​Courtesy of Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp-Rome.

During Salone del Mobile in Milan, Muller Van Severen is presenting an exhibition of fifteen unique, life-size aluminium candle holders. Each form is an abstract reinterpretation of recurring motifs from Muller Van Severen’s oeuvre, alongside forms that already emerged in the earlier individual practices of Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen: chairs, cabinets, lamps, vases and sculptural structures. Through rotation, inversion or closure, these archetypes are reduced to their contours — to silhouettes that abandon their original function and emerge as autonomous signs in space.

The use of a single, uniform colour and material —aluminium— for each object reinforces their formal clarity, emphasising rhythm, proportion and composition. The installation unfolds as a coherent ensemble of distinct elements: each work retains its independence while simultaneously entering into dialogue with the surrounding forms. A large coloured candle crowns the top of each structure, introducing a temporal dimension. As the candle burns, the object undergoes a slow and irreversible transformation. What initially appears static becomes subject to change.

Time thus operates as a sculptural, spatially designed material. Silhouettes explores the subtle boundary between recognition and abstraction. Those familiar with the earlier work of Muller Van Severen may discern fragments of known forms; those encountering it without prior reference will experience autonomous, abstract presences. It demonstrates how the familiar can shift without losing its essence — and how a form, once freed from function, can assume a new presence.

This exhibition does not mark a conclusion, but rather a celebration with an act of a pause within an ongoing exploration of reduction, balance and tension.

Silhouettes: Celebrating 15 years
​18-26 April 2026 / 10 AM - 8 PM

Address
​Ordet ​
​Via Filippino Lippi 4
​20131 Milan

Images (download here)

The book - A Lot of Work

Published by Apartamento, the book A Lot of Work brings together works from their individual artistic practices and their collaborative oeuvre. Before forming Muller Van Severen and becoming one of Europe's most image-defining design studio, Fien Muller (°1978) and Hannes Van Severen (°1979) worked independently as artists—Muller in photography and Van Severen in sculpture.

As a photographer, Fien Muller tells stories in still lifes,—not as a genre, but as a method. As a photographer, she isolates objects, sometimes in a box, sometimes in a room, and gives them space to breathe differently. Objects lie, hang, float, lean. Their function dissolves. A plate is no longer a plate; fruit is no longer fruit. What remains is weight, skin, colour, gravity. There is no hierarchy in her arrangements, nor between things. Everything can be placed, removed, turned. Sometimes the images are absurd. Sometimes they feel tender. They always ask the viewer not to decode, but to look longer.

Hannes Van Severen, working primarily with furniture, similarly begins with what is recognisable. For him, furniture carries an inherent intimacy: it supports the body; it holds us. By cutting, extending, repeating, or recombining familiar forms, Van Severen subtly disrupts that intimacy. A chair remains a chair—and yet no longer behaves like one. His work inhabits the delicate threshold where recognition begins to tremble. When assembled into installations, these altered pieces often resemble landscapes—small territories shaped by balance, tension, and proportion. They may appear playful at first glance, yet they also carry an undercurrent of discomfort. For Van Severen, misunderstanding is not failure but necessity: if everything is immediately clear, it is already closed.

By presenting both their independent and collaborative works side by side, the book illuminates the shared sensibility that underpins Muller Van Severen’s practice: a deep attentiveness to form, space, and the quiet transformation of the everyday. Chairs, cabinets, lamps, fruits, fabrics, and sculptural structures appear not as fixed objects but as presences in transformation—shifted, rearranged, and subtly unsettled. It reveals how their design language—now internationally celebrated—emerged from an ongoing artistic inquiry into perception, balance, and the boundaries between function and fiction. ​

This publication is not merely a retrospective, but a portrait of two artists whose dialogue between art and design continues to reshape contemporary visual culture.

During the exhibition, the Apartamento publication will be presented within a dedicated Apartamento bookshop on the first floor of the exhibition space.

Muller Van Severen - A Lot of Work
​Published by Apartamento ​
​​
​Presale date: March 25, 2026
​Global Release date: Week of April 13, 2026
​hardcover, 224 pages
​297 mm × 210 mm
​ISBN: 978-84-09-83344-3

About Muller Van Severen
​
​Founded in 2011 by Belgian artists Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen, Muller Van Severen emerged from years of individual practices as visual artists and a shared desire to rethink the everyday. Their collaboration began with the design of functional objects and evolved into a distinct language shaped by sculpture, architecture and use — independent of trends or external expectations.

Their furniture exists as drawings in space: fine lines, transparency and openness allow both the surrounding architecture and the objects within to remain visible. Rather than occupying or enclosing, each piece frames and activates its environment. Their work moves between opposites — presence and absence, strength and fragility, control and spontaneity. Reduced to its essentials yet never neutral, each design carries a quiet tension, balancing sharp and soft gestures. Instead of imposing itself, it enters into dialogue with its context while maintaining a clear and recognisable identity.

Function is fundamental to their practice, and every formal decision serves use. Solid, timeless materials are applied in their purest form and combined in unexpected ways. Colour plays a central role, treated as material rather than ornament, shaping rhythm, contrast and spatial perception.

Through an intuitive and ongoing dialogue, Muller Van Severen has established a singular and internationally recognised voice within contemporary design.

About Apartamento

Apartamento is an independent publisher working across print, film, and site-specific projects, engaging with art, design, and everyday life. Founded in 2008 with the launch of its namesake magazine, Apartamento is widely recognised as the leading lifestyle publication and time-honoured alternative to glossy interiors magazines, known for its unfiltered, human approach and its commitment to long-form conversations with celebrated artists, writers, designers, and thinkers across disciplines. Each issue features intimate perspectives on creative life, serving as a platform for voices at different moments in their practice accompanied by photography that unsettles conventional categories. The values of the magazine extend beyond print, forming community in real spaces through events, collaborations, and exhibitions around the world, alongside a growing body of short and documentary films. Apartamento’s publishing branch began in 2015 as a natural extension of the stories and ideas that have grown out of the magazine.

In addition to a curated selection of monographs, photobooks, and books on art, design, architecture, food, and visual culture, Apartamento is renowned for its culinary landmarks, including the best-selling Atelier September: A place for daytime cooking with Frederik Bille Brahe, and for its revival of fashion-world classics by Kyoichi Tsuzuki.