Bavaria, with its brightly-coloured symmetrical, ‘book-matched’ inlays, depicts bountiful scenes of farm-life, including red barns and silos, horse corrals and dog houses, sunflowers, shafts of wheat, vegetables and luscious fruit-bearing trees which give shade to county- fair-worthy cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, and sheep, and the occasional mouse and blackbird. Moving across the flat, super-dense surfaces are the tools which keep such an active farm flourishing: tractors and oil drums and wheel barrows and spades and shovels and brooms and saws and horseshoes. Above the tumult, bluebirds fly in a Rosewood sky.

Inspired by 17th and 18th century Bavarian hand-painted furniture, as seen in the collections of the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Studio Job playfully switch mediums and methods, using marquetry, a traditional craft of the ‘applied arts’, to impersonate the ‘fine art’ of painting. In the process, they wantonly dismiss the historic distinctions between the fine, the graphic, and the applied arts, declaring,

“In marquetry you are free as a painter; the veneers are like paint and the furniture piece functions as the canvas”.

The furnishings, while in style antiquated, rural and mysteriously regional, are so finely, so preciously conceived and executed that they seem surely more destined for Queen Marie Antoinette’s ‘Pleasure Dairy’ at Rambouillet than for the everyday wear and tear of the common man’s farm house.

In Studio Job’s ‘Bavaria’, we return to Eden – or at least an animated, naively happy, story- book rendition of Paradise, where man’s innocent, simple toil, applied to nature’s bounty, reaps a peaceful and prosperous harvest.