Pettersen & Hein is the shared practice of Magnus Pettersen (b. 1983) and Lea Hein (b. 1981), established in 2015. Pettersen graduated as an artist from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2011; Hein completed her furniture design studies at Högskolan för design och konsthantverk in Gothenburg in 2014. The work occupies the field between their two disciplines, taking the questions of design and answering them with the aesthetic and ethical latitude of an art practice.
From a studio in Albertslund, they make each work by hand in concrete, steel, ceramic, and wood. Their dyeing techniques carry pigment - orange, turquoise, dark blue, purple - through the body of the cast, where it settles into patterns that emerge with the object and cannot be specified in advance. Imperfections are retained. They record how the piece came into being, and the studio treats them as information rather than damage.
The forms arise from observation of the built environment and return to it altered. A View from the Present 1-13, thirteen coloured concrete benches shown at Copenhagen Contemporary, took the most anonymous object of civic furniture and made each one particular. The Superbloom vase drew its surface from a rare desert flowering. Across the work, materials associated with infrastructure and expediency are given weight, colour, and a domestic address.
At Innenkreis, the duo presents three concrete works: a bird bath conceived as an all-inclusive resort for its guests, a planter, and a smiling face. Their material is one that outlasts the use it was poured for, which places these objects squarely within the exhibition's concerns. Concrete carries its own future as ruin, and here it has been given something generous to do in the meantime.