Every single one of Markus Haase’s pieces is crafted entirely by hand. Born and raised in Germany, Haase began his career as an electrician. “I was working the night shift, and [one night] I smoked some weed and found a stone without having any idea of carving, and I took a knife and sandpaper and made a torso of a woman from it,” he tells Business of Home. “I did that twice, and then I went to my boss and said, ‘I quit. I’m going to be a sculptor because that’s what [feels] fun, and that I’m looking forward to every morning when I get up.”
He went on to apprentice with a stone carver and worked restoring old European cathedrals for 10 years, replicating the original gothic ornaments and angel designs. On the side, Haase crafted his own designs, but it wasn’t until he moved to New York in 2009 that he dove into sculpture full-time. A few years later, he landed representation at the gallery Todd Merrill Studio, and now crafts lighting as well as functional furniture pieces like consoles, chairs and dining tables, specializing in materials like onyx and bronze.
Haase’s hands-on design process puts form before function. “I learned how to cast metal many years ago, and now I have seven employees in Germany in my studio, and we have a big range of commissions at all times,” he says. “We do everything in-house. I’ve never used any other fabricator.” He is involved in every step, making the prototypes by himself in clay, plaster and Styrofoam before working with his team to create the final product. “I grow by doing things. The ideas grow on me by making mistakes, and the coincidences that happen become part of the process,” he adds. “For me, the function has to follow the form.”
His recent works include the sinuous Sthenos console crafted in ashwood, marble and bronze, the architectural Circlet Table Light sculpture carved from bronze and onyx, and the Catena series chandelier—a suspended wonder with hand-carved bronze links and onyx lanterns. For his bronze pieces, he doesn’t use traditional mold casting, instead opting to individually hand-carve and cast, and then the onyx is set into the bronze.
Haase is currently developing new versions of the Catena series, letting his inspiration guide him. “I was always interested in the way to hang things, and there’s got to be some steel wire and some electrical wire, and it’s bothering me, so I’m working on making the wire be part of the sculpture to explore, again, the form and the function,” he says. “I work very intuitively. Sometimes I sit down, I meditate, and when I bring my kids to bed, and after the bedtime story, I look at the ceiling, and I’m really getting into forming ideas, and then I get the basic form in my head. I imagine it, create a form that I find interesting, and then I sculpt it to make it beautiful, and then I keep on transforming the form into something functional.”
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