The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
27 March 2025
The Collection of Sylvia & Garry Knox Bennett 
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Richard La Trobe-Bateman

Unfolding/Hanging Utility Chair

United Kingdom, 1988
walnut open: 40¼ h × 15 w × 19 d in (102 × 38 × 48 cm) folded: 59½ h × 15 w × 5 d in (151 × 38 × 13 cm) mounted: 2½ h × 18 w × 3½ d in (6 × 46 × 9 cm)
estimate: $1,000–1,500
result: $699
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Sold with a digital copy of correspondence from the artist to Garry Knox Bennett and the handcrafted wall mount,
provenance: Acquired directly from the artist, Collection of Sylvia and Garry Knox Bennett
exhibited: The Artist Collects: The Chairs of Garry and Sylvia Bennett, 1998, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA

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Larger Than Life: Garry Knox Bennett

by Glenn Adamson

Garry Knox Bennett was a big man. Big in every way. Tall. Fulsomely bearded. Physically powerful. A veritable Paul Bunyan of furniture, with expansive creativity and curiosity to match. Whatever world he stepped into didn’t quite measure up to him; and so, in the nicest possible way, he had to make it that much more capacious.

Whatever world [Garry] stepped into didn’t quite measure up to him; and so, in the nicest possible way, he had to make it that much more capacious.

That pattern set in early, when, as he put it, “the flower people came to Frisco.” (He was a man of Oakland, with a lifelong suspicion of the fancier sister city across the bay.) Having already gone to art school, initially as a painter and focusing increasingly on sculpture, he now discovered himself as an entrepreneur, starting up a business called Squirkenworks and selling handmade drug paraphernalia at a rapid clip. “God bless the hippies,” he used to say fondly. "They loved anything ugly.” 

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