When Marcel Duchamp exhibited his “Bottle Rack” in 1914 there was outrage. In placing a quotidian object in the context of a gallery, he made an everyday object a work of art merely by choosing it. Few since Duchamp have been as daring; Dan Flavin’s fluorescent lights, Carl Andre’s bricks and Jeff Koons’s Hoover are mediated by the artists in some way to become art. But whether through Duchamp’s Dada or Joseph Beuys’s shamanism, the mundane object has become a permanent fixture in the gallery. The relationship between design and art is becoming ever closer.

Grcic’s Chair One for Magis

That relationship is currently being reinforced by two institutions on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The Art Institute of Chicago is about to present its first design show in its new Renzo Piano-designed wing, while London’s Serpentine Gallery is also about to open its first design display. Both (independently) hit on the same subject, Konstantin Grcic, though their approaches differ. The Art Institute is putting on a retrospective of his work; and Grcic is curating a show for the Serpentine gallery – a world of objects seen through the eyes of a designer.

Born in Munich, Grcic studied as a cabinetmaker at Parnham and then at the Royal College of Art in London, before returning to the city of his birth to set up his studio in 1991. He gained a reputation as a compelling designer of a very modernist kind, a designer intrigued by production, industry and manufacture but who never took the pure German functional route, preferring instead to surprise, to create new forms that often appeared uncomfortable, unconventional.

For a century, Germany has been associated with a particular kind of modernism, a smooth line that flowed through the integration of product design and corporate identity devised by Peter Behrens for AEG in the early 1900s, through the Bauhaus of the 1920s and on through the Ulm School and the exquisitely functional designs of Dieter Rams for Braun. Grcic doesn’t quite fit into that tradition – his designs are a little too eccentric – yet he is inseparable from it. His most famous creations, the futuristic, triangulated frame of Chair One, the disconcerting cantilever of the Miura bar stool, the clunky anti-aesthetic of the Chaos armchair, are a world away from the relentless logic of other German designers. They just don’t look that comfortable – but they invariably are. Grcic manages to combine innovative engineering, design geared to manufacture and a strange and compelling sculptural beauty in a way that is virtually unique.

Speedglas 9100 welding mask designed by 3M

Unlike an increasing number of his contemporaries, however, Grcic does not design for the gallery. The emergence of that unsatisfactory hybrid “design art” in the past few years has led to a kind of anti-design, objects designed for display (and sale) rather than use. It is anathema to Grcic. “From day one,” he says, “I made that decision [to avoid the idea of design art], as soon as I left college I called my business Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design, even though I didn’t have a single industrial client.”

Yet here Grcic is in the midst of art, with both these institutions deciding to launch their design agendas with him. I ask him whether the display of design in a museum context brings it closer to art. “No,” he says, “I am not an artist because I show in a museum. But then there are some designs that we see in the street every day which can be very beautiful. By putting these in a museum you create attention and focus. You look closer and more carefully in a way that you wouldn’t if the same thing was just on the street, or a chair in a café.”

The Serpentine’s Design Real show is Grcic doing exactly that – placing mass-produced objects in a gallery context. It is not a new approach, but in recent years it has become a real design trope. It is seen, for example, in Humble Masterpieces, curator Paola Antonelli’s show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and in industrial designer Sam Hecht’s extraordinary collection of Objects under a Fiver, which travels round the world, growing as it goes and displaying some astonishingly beautiful objects from hardware shelves and discount stores.

The Volvo tail-light

Serpentine curator Hans Ulrich Obrist sees the design exhibition as firmly in this tradition. “We wanted this show to be about design for all,” he tells me. “Over the last few years design has become rarefied and we didn’t want this show to be about [limited] editions but to reflect back the world in which we live.”

Obrist adds: “I have always thought that the most interesting design exhibitions, the ones which make a mark, were those that were curated by designers.” And Grcic’s selection is certainly a thought-provoking one: it encompasses a few familiar classics (Herman Miller’s Aeron chair and Jasper Morrison’s Air Chair for Magis), but is more characterised by production items by lesser-known designers. These include the wonderful LifeStraw (a drinking straw that purifies water), the front spoiler of a Lamborghini, and a Volvo tail light. It is a striking collection, an elegant compilation of considered forms and shapes that have been sculpted by research, function, manufacture and consumption, a searingly accurate if personal snapshot of contemporary production and taste.

“I think it’s important to talk about these things in everyday culture,” Grcic says. “Design is certainly moving into the galleries. Students now design for galleries not for industry. Industry is just not fashionable.” It might become just that little bit more so when these two shows open.

‘Design Real’ is at the Serpentine from November 26 to February 7; ‘Konstantin Grcic: Decisive Design’ is at the Art Institute of Chicago from November 20 to January 24