CASTRATED at an early age, and estranged from his surroundings by his scale, the 12 year-old miniature horse Floyd was kept as as a house pet in England before being moved to his current stables in Ostprignitz, in Germany’s Brandenburg region.

Not to be confused with ponies, miniature horses differ from their relatives in both size and characteristics. The line between ponies and horses is strictly guarded by communities of miniature horse owners. The American Miniature Horse Association sets an upper height limit of 34 inches (86cm) as one of its registration criteria and states that a miniature horse, seen devoid of a scale reference, should be identical in characteristics, conformation and proportion to a full-sized horse. The association declares its  objective as producing ‘the smallest possible perfect horse’.

This piece borrows its detailing and materiality from vitrines that Kaare Klint designed for The Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen, when it was first established in the former Frederick’s hospital building in 1926. Klint designed a museum display system that echoed the modular structure and contamination-limiting function of the hospital wards.

Kaare Klint is often referred to as a ‘father’ of Danish modernism. His principle of stripping down and mutating inherited classical forms, rather than radically rejecting history, distinguished Danish modernism from other more revolutionary currents within modernism, like the Bauhaus.

This is one of a series of mutations of Klint’s museum furniture,in which the standardised proportions and details are specifically adapted to its  contents, and the glass has been removed so that the work breaks out of its frame, while fingers, hay, dust and excrement enter in.