Kirjahaku

Mathieu Matégot was a leading French designer of the 1950s. This artist of Hungarian origin was highly productive over a period of some twenty years, experimenting with materials, form and colour both in his furniture designs and in the art of tapestry-making, which he practiced into the 1980s. He invented his own artistic language, whose key elements were rigitulle, a type of perforated sheet metal, which he patented and which, by means of a system of folds, enabled him to shape his perforated metal in space, as well as férotin, a balanced blending of metal and rattan. He commercialised his furniture abroad through his own company, notably in the UK and the Netherlands, and in the 1950s regularly participated in the major trade shows, such as the Salon des arts ménagers (domestic arts trade fair) and the Salon des artistes décorateurs (Interior decorators trade fair). He designed many significant public and private commissions: part of the Drugstore des Champs-Élysées, the layout of the airport of Tit-Mellil in Casablanca, and many tapestries for Air France, the French consulate in New York, etc. This book provides a detailed overview of his entire career, thanks to a number of documents from the period, especially those made available in his family archives. It helps to better understand the inspiration for his creations and most importantly to rediscover a rich and varied body of work. Text in English and French.

"It is a rare species, but it exists," as '60s art critic Pascal Renous pointed out on the subject of artistic couples. This designer-decorator duo of Janine Abraham and Dirk-Jan Rol met at Jacques Dumond's studio in 1955. The couple shares the same love of precision, line and plain colours. Their earliest joint creations were first exhibited at the Salon des artistes decorateurs, in Paris. Their furniture, made of wicker, wood and aluminium, twice won prizes at the Salon des artistes decorateurs (a sideboard in 1956 and an armchair in 1958), garnering notice from the public and professionals alike. Jean Royere did not hesitate to use their emblematic Soleil armchair (gold medal at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair) in the decoration of the palace of the Shah of Iran, in Teheran. Their light and functional designs are available today, re-edited by Yota Design. Abraham & Rol were also interior designers and intervened in this capacity for both individual clients and large corporate clients, such as Yves Rocher and Saint-Gobain, with the same precision and sense of composition that define their furniture pieces. Finally, the couple also expressed their creativity through architecture, their mastery of this discipline enabling them to design some twenty houses from the 1960s through the 2000s in the Ile-de-France region. Their homes are genuine inhabited sculptures, of which certain have become truly emblematic.