Belgian artist duo Muller Van Severen is presenting Pianos, a new series of functional sculptures, at Tim Van Laere Gallery in Rome. The show is the duo's second solo exhibition with the gallery, and it turns one of music's most familiar objects into something deliberately useless. Announced on 29 October, the series is described as functional sculpture, a label the exhibition immediately undercuts: these are objects built around a function they decline to perform.

The series comprises seven unique pieces finished in glossy lacquer. Each one evokes the silhouette of a piano, yet none can be played. Instead the forms have been repurposed as cabinets, tables, benches and wall sculptures, with six of the seven topped by an opaline glass sphere that catches the light like a small moon resting on the instrument's body.

The title carries a second meaning in Italian, where piano also denotes a level or a plane, and the works play on that ambiguity, treating the piano's broad horizontal surfaces as shelves, seats and stages rather than as a keyboard's housing. The gesture nods to the surrealist tradition of Duchamp and Magritte, in which an everyday object is estranged from its function and made strange again.

Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen have collaborated since the spring of 2011, building a practice that sits between art and design. Their furniture-like sculptures are made to be looked at as much as used, and Pianos pushes that tension to its limit: objects that announce themselves as instruments while refusing to make a sound.