Eileen Gray, the secret photographer within... Until December 21st, 2007 at the Gallerie Historismus

The Historismus Gallery presents an important and rare collection of sixty original works on paper by Eileen Gray (Enniscothy, Ireland 1878-Paris, 1976). This collection includes gouaches, collages and photographs never exposed before and covers a period from 1918 to the 1950's. Gray had offered those works to Peter Adam, her friend, biographer and author of a book about her work entitled "Eileen Gray Architecture and Design", to be published soon.

Better known as Designer, notably for the Art Deco style, EILEEN GRAY painter by training, has also left a pictorial work marked by the non-figuration.
Gray's non-figuration began with her first contact with the work of Gerrit Rietveld, the architect and innovative Dutch designer, who became her artistic Idol. From this moment, she repudiated her previous work, a derivative of cubism (a kind of abstraction that was explored in her painting and sculpture at least ten years earlier), that she described as the work of a "Parisian decorator" obsessed with the use of precious materials, rather than by the formal aspect of art. She denounced as a consequence, the "horrors of Art Deco" (…)

In her post-Rietveld period, Gray photographed virtually all her design work. However, her photographs were not simple souvenirs of her creation: they were necessary careful constructivist compositions, sometimes made of everyday objects, that Peter Adam called tablescapes. Influenced by Man Ray and Andre Kertesz, she also photographed domestic and industrial landscapes. These pictures are at least as rare as her drawings.

Roberto Polo, Directeur artistique

Eileen Gray
from november 15th to december 21st, 2007
Free entrance

Historismus Gallerie
www.historismus.com
HÔTEL DE CHAUNES
9 place des Vosges
75004 Paris

mailto: galerie@historismus.com

t. +33 (0)1 42 71 21 60
f. +33 (0)1 42 71 21 57