With the wealth of design exhibitions, events, and conferences flooding New York this month, one is poised to be super selective. An exhibition you should not miss is Reinventing Traditions: The Other Side of French Postmodern Design, a group show at Magen H Gallery. Like many of the Gallery’s previous exhibits, it features surprising, fresh, historical furniture and objects rarely if ever exhibited before, all presented through the taste and research of its dynamic owner, Hugues Magen. This little gem exhibit is beautiful, intriguing, and educating—just what I expect when walking into an exhibition.
This is a meticulous examination of furniture design by French architects active during the postwar era. As most of these pieces were created for private architecture commissions, they never went into production—these 50 pieces, crafted to be one-of-a-kind, personal and site-specific, were designed by Alain Gaubert, Jean Jacques Erny, Alain Marcoz, Hervé Baley, Jean Touret and by the artisans of Marolles: Sylvain Contini, Jacques Avoinet, Anne Barres, Ilina Horning and Denise Bigot. There is still much to learn in the realm of French postwar design.
Aside from the beauty of these pieces, crafted in wood, they reflect the essence of French taste. What I found mostly intriguing was the curatorial theme that illuminates the presence of Postmodernism in France. Forget what you thought you knew about Italian and American quintessential postmodernist design, about the bold patterns, the vibrant colors, the plastic, kitsch, and intensity. The French architects featured in this exhibition embraced traditional craftsmanship, refusing reductive modernism. Instead, they designed furniture in organic, soft forms, with respect to the natural property of the materials.
As a whole, the show tells the story of the preservation of craftsmanship in France, as practiced in sharp, smart, sophisticated functional objects. Another objective of the show is to announce the Gallery’s fall solo exhibition of architect Hervé Baley’s original built work, who studied at the free workshops at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 50s, and who was largely influenced by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, creating the most spectacular cubistic furniture in plywood and who will be the subject of a monograph published this fall. When you visit the show, do not miss his cubist chair, the show’s final work.
The exhibition with run through May 27th, 2022 at Magen H Gallery, 54 East 11th Street, New York.
