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 and for Silhouettes, a special exhibition during Salone del Mobile in Milan, presented in collaboration with Tim Van Laere Gallery (Antwerp–Rome).

Following years of friendship and collaboration with Apartamento, this moment brings together publication and exhibition into a constellation celebrating 15 years of shared practice.

"Over fifteen years, we have taken risks. Working with heavy materials while trying to make them feel weightless. Trusting colour as structure rather than decoration. Not every experiment succeeded. Some works felt unresolved. Some ideas remained drawings. But even the failures shaped the language. To mark fifteen years of Muller Van Severen, this book and the exhibition feel less like a retrospective and more like a pause. A breath."
​— Muller Van Severen

Conceived as a pause within an ongoing trajectory rather than a retrospective, this moment reflects on the visual language that connects Muller Van Severen’s work with the artists’ earlier individual practices, bringing together forms that originate both in their independent work and in the collaborative oeuvre they have developed since founding their studio in 2011.

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

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

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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.