Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier
Next Autumn, Brussels based gallery Rodolphe Janssen will clear its exhibition space for a unique set of furniture and architectural elements by four of the most important 20th century designers: Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier. The organization of the show has been entrusted to the Parisian Galerie Patrick Seguin, which has been organizing similar retrospectives since 2003 at Sonnabend in New York and Gagosian in Los Angeles.
The influence of Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret et Le Corbusier on our way of life and thinking, as architects and pioneering visionaries of Modernism, can hardly be underestimated.
The exhibition will illustrate this by highlighting a number of key pieces from the extraordinarily rich body of work of each of these architects and designers. The
pieces on show will range from the « fauteuil Cité » that was created by Jean Prouvé for the Cité Universitaire in Nancy in 1933, as part of his first big assignment for public space, to the « Forme Libre » table in mahogany developed by Charlotte Perriand in 1962 for a private assignment, together with a curved cabinet in the same material.
As to Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, the exhibition will particularly focus on furniture which they designed in the context of their vast urban project for Chandigarh in India: exclusive pieces such as a concrete lamp (1952-56) by Le Corbusier, aluminium shutters (1955) by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, a « Kangourou » lounge chair (1960) by Pierre Jeanneret, etc. All these elements were part of a larger whole that was developed by Pierre Jeanneret for the public buildings of the Capitol in this most remarkable metropolis, and that were perfectly adapted to the language and morphology of these constructions.
