Max Lamb

Max Lamb designs sophisticated and personal bodies of work particular to material, location, and tradition. The works of this British designer are made with simple and direct actions: cutting, carving, sand casting, molding, folding. Lamb insists that he is not a craftsman, but that he is good at making, and his facility with a range of materials has led him to seek collaborations with different craftspeople and industries. There is a consistent form with which he switches from one process to the next, retaining a Max style of form and concept while taking a pragmatic view of production. He has carved stone from China to Italy, and Vermont, and cast bronze with a lost-polystyrene method. Max Lamb is a consistent exemplar of an artist or designer that can maintain unique forms which refer to themselves as icons, they emphasize their materiality through the difference and repetition.

Max Lamb was born in St. Austell, Cornwall, England, in 1980. He lives and works in London, United Kingdom. Lamb’s works are collected by numerous public institutions around the world, including the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, the Design Museum Gent in Belgium, The Design Museum in London, SFMOMA in San Francisco and the Odunpazarı Modern Museum in Eskişehir, Turkey. In 2018 he had his first Institutional solo show Max Lamb: Exercises in Seating at the Art Institute of Chicago.