The retrospective thus assumed a critical distance: it did not seek to revive a vanished collective energy, but to confront the works with their own historicity and their displacement within the museum context. The exhibited objects, originally conceived in a spirit of experimentation and often without certainty as to their future, were reinserted into the climate of the 1980s.
Among the pieces presented was the Kangaroo Chair (c. 1990). The chair features a generously padded seat and backrest, upholstered in red leather, and rests on a curved metal structure. This work does not seek to blend harmoniously into an interior, but instead asserts its presence as an autonomous structure.
The Arc Floor Lamp (1989), designed by Gerd Arens and produced by Pentagon Köln, consists of a taut metal arc into which several visible light bulbs are integrated, all resting on a base. This work functions less as a light source than as a physical—almost architectural—marker of the environment.
The Table for the Café Casino (1987), created by Pentagon Gruppe with Meyer Voggenreiter, refers to one of the collective’s most emblematic projects: the Café Casino designed for documenta 8. Conceived as a space for encounters and experimentation, this café—entirely fitted out by the group—quickly became an iconic and itinerant venue, helping to establish their international recognition.
Brought together at the MAKK, these objects did not seek to reconstruct a history, but instead bore witness to a precise moment when design, conceived as a collective and experimental practice, deliberately kept its distance from any form of formal or ideological stability.
Design Gruppe Pentagon – MAKK
Contrary to what earlier readings have sometimes suggested, Pentagon was never a design group in the programmatic or ideological sense of the term. Founded in Cologne in the mid-1980s, the Pentagon Gruppe was based above all on a dynamic of collective action: producing, exhibiting, experimenting, without certainty as to the outcome. More than a shared formal program, it was a way of working together that united its members, within a cultural context marked by the questioning of modernist ideals and by the political and media instability of the 1980s. The group’s works take the form of radical constructions, often made of raw steel, rejecting both the normative legacy of Good Form and the conciliatory aesthetics of postmodernism.
The retrospective devoted to Pentagon at the MAKK in 2020 acknowledged the fact that the group could no longer be approached as a stable or active entity. The former members, now dispersed, had quickly understood that the conditions of their collective work could not be reactivated. Rather than attempting to reconstruct this past dynamic, the exhibition focused on the objects, documents, and testimonies that had endured over time. These elements were presented as traces of a situated practice, born of a specific cultural and political context, rather than as manifestations of a coherent aesthetic program.
Among the pieces presented was the Kangaroo Chair (c. 1990). The chair features a generously padded seat and backrest, upholstered in red leather, and rests on a curved metal structure. This work does not seek to blend harmoniously into an interior, but instead asserts its presence as an autonomous structure.
The Arc Floor Lamp (1989), designed by Gerd Arens and produced by Pentagon Köln, consists of a taut metal arc into which several visible light bulbs are integrated, all resting on a base. This work functions less as a light source than as a physical—almost architectural—marker of the environment.
