American sculptor Jonathan Prince is known throughout the world for his bold, monumental works in steel, stone and wood. Cultural Union visits his studio to witness the artist’s latest works and his foray into collectible design.

“I’m a professional manifester of ideas,” says the contemporary American sculptor, Jonathan Prince. “I try to generate the meaning these pieces have for me, and to share that with others.” 

Prince is surrounded by objects as mysterious as they are beautiful, each the product of his appetite for knowledge. “The wonderful thing about creativity is that whatever you’ve experienced in your life applies – nothing is a waste of time,” he says. “Whether it’s my appreciation of neuroscience, materials or spirituality, they are all reflected in the work.”

Prince – who has every appearance of a man just hitting his stride – has packed in several lifetimes already. A one-time maxillofacial surgeon, he also won an Emmy during a stint in Hollywood. Later, he was a successful digital entrepreneur before giving it all up to follow his lifelong calling to be a sculptor. And 25 years in, he’s one of the world’s most sought-after contemporary artists.

“The work is not about creating an object or a product – it’s about sharing emotion”

Jonathan Prince

Prince’s drive to express ideas and experiences through his artworks is a major source of their potency. His sculptures have a talismanic appeal; they invite you to interact and engage while retaining the enigma of artefacts unearthed from a distant future. This otherworldliness is not just cerebral; much of it comes from the craft – the pristine engineering, the perfection of the mirrored steel, and then the opposite – the rips, the rust, the fissures. 

For Prince, ideas and craftsmanship are both parts of a shared endeavour. “The work is not about creating an object or a product – it’s about sharing emotion with the collectors we’re engaged with. And that emotion for me has always been more about passion. Celebrating the best that humanity can do, the best the human hand can make.”

The Jonathan Prince Studio is headquartered in Berkshire House, Massachusetts, where the New Yorker conceives and fabricates his works in a 20,000-sq-ft studio set in beautiful grounds. However, we are meeting in Maison Berkshire – the sculptor’s new European base in Brussels, home city of his wife, the art curator Stephanie Manasseh. The couple met six years ago when working together on a project at Christie’s in New York (“It took me five minutes to fall in love,” he says), and Prince gives much credit to Manasseh for the global demand for his work. 

“I’m a nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy,” he says. “I stay there, focus, and work. I’m not great about making the connections outside. But Stephanie told me that for people to love your work, they have to see your work. And that was her mission.”

The studio’s expansion to Brussels also heralds a new development – a move into functional design. “I felt that this debate around ‘what’s sculpture, what’s design?’ is an artificial area,” says Prince. “Many designers want to be sculptors, but few sculptors want to be designers because of the [wildly different] price points that are artificially set between the two – a product versus a sculpture.” 

Prince describes how certain sculptural projects the studio has created in the past felt design-orientated, and he suggests the whimsical wall art Looking Glass as an example. “I always felt Looking Glass was on the border – it works as well in a design-oriented situation as it does as a purely sculptural object.” 

Flow State Console is another piece of functional design that was initially sculptural. “I made a sculpture and thought that if you put a door in it, it would be one of the most beautiful cabinets ever made.”

A catalyst for Prince’s foray into functional design was his collaboration with Canadian designer Nicolas Pomerleau, who now leads Jonathan Prince’s design studio. Pomerleau, who comes from a product and design background, began working with Prince two years ago, and the studio’s series of glass tables is one of the results.

“Each piece is cast from solid glass,” says Pomerleau. “They take three to four months to cool down, so it’s a very long process. The finish is acid-etch, which is highly smooth and interesting. They’re the kind of piece you can look at for hours and still find different things.”

To illustrate, Pomerleau rests his phone’s torch on the surface, with the beam facing down into the solid glass body. The cool marine green instantly comes alive: hundreds of tiny bubbles caught in the glass are illuminated like an effervescent ocean or a spiralling cluster of galaxies.

Prince himself had initial reservations about the bubbles. “But then I lived with the piece for a while, and I realised they are part of the process,” he says. “We’re capturing motion – almost like capturing champagne in a spring.” He adds: “Each of these is individually made. They’re all different. They’re all incredible. And every time the sun hits them, they are a different piece. It’s remarkable.”

In this sense, the glass tables, with their blend of perfection and imperfection, are a continuation of a theme of tension that runs throughout Prince’s work. Rust versus polish. Smooth and cracked. Stability versus chaos. Stacked metal boxes balanced at the cusp of collapse. Handcraft versus raw geology.

An example of this tension between opposed states hangs on the walls of Maison Berkshire. Dakota Skin is a striking piece of wall art created from a piece of buffalo rawhide usually used for ceremonial drums, given to Prince by an elder of the Lakota tribe in South Dakota. Prince soaked the skin for a week, then moulded it for several months into its current contorted shape, which is stretched on elastic ropes and mounted like a drum head. “It is under tension; it’s being pulled into this perfected geometry and it’s resisting it. It’s the transcendent nature of the freedom of this animal on the planet. That’s what drove me to create this piece.”

Prince’s works are collected across the world, from private collectors to museums and galleries. They have been exhibited at multiple public spaces across New York City including at Christie’s, 590 Madison Sculpture Garden and Pier 64 Hudson River Park. By any measurement, Prince has achieved his goals, yet – in common perhaps with others who have had a life before success – he takes none of it for granted, approaching each new project with contagious enthusiasm.

 “I started this career 25 years ago, thinking: I’m still young enough – I can have a full-time career as an artist, and particularly as a sculptor,” he says. “What I didn’t realise was just how amazing it would be and how fulfilling it would be.

“I feel so lucky to have been able to find myself at a later age, and to have a career that people are starting to really celebrate. It has been the greatest blessing.”