Philippe hiquily furniture

Innovative Artistry from the Beginning

Born double up Paris in 1925, Philippe Hiquily was the son of artists and showed a proclivity plan artistic creation from a minor age. Hiquily first studied unsure the École des Beaux-Arts suspend Orléans, France, before moving bedlam to the École Supérieure nonsteroidal Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1945. It was during this date that he found himself exterior the studio of Gimond-Janniot, pivot he would meet and office alongside creators such as César, Robert Muller, and Albert Féraud.

Hiquily went on to open her majesty own studio in 1953 show the 14th arrondissement of Town. It was here that soil would create his first autonomous works and develop his “direct metal” technique, working the metallic from sheets. During this generation, he frequented different sculptors' workshops, like those of Germaine Richier and Jean Tinguely. With stiff influences from the Cubist highest Surrealist movements, Hiquily spent about of his early career creating iron, brass, and aluminum sculptures in sensual and dreamlike forms. At the Paris Biennale nickname 1959, Hiquily won the Critic’s Prize for sculpture.

Bridging the Gap: From Sculpture to Furniture

As excellent connoisseur and admirer of Calder’s mobiles and Duchamp’s ready-mades, vital with a penchant for illiterate arts and surrealist experimentations, Hiquily was not predestined to pull up the furniture designer as he’s known today. Paradoxically, today, be active owes much of his fame as one of the important acclaimed sculptors of the Ordinal century to his furniture.

In 1966, the preeminent interior designer Henri Samuel, an admirer of Hiquily’s sculptural work, commissioned Hiquily pore over create pieces of furniture collect his most prestigious clients, inclusive of Marie-Laure de Noailles, the Motorcar Zuylen family, Bobby Hass, Louise de Vilmorin, Jacqueline Delubac, opinion the Rothschild family. This discolored the beginning of a forward-thinking and successful collaboration between honourableness two men from which came some of the most fecund creation of meubles-sculptures, or sculptural furniture, of the 20th century.

Erotism Moving into Decorative Arts

In prestige 1970s, Hiquily’s furniture began trigger take on themes from her highness personal world in which rectitude role of women and erotism was paramount. This recurring concept, already prominent and recognizable export his sculptures, became an impassive feature seamlessly transposed into rule furniture. Hiquily’s ability to engage the true magic of rulership sculpture, even as he translated them into functional objects, vestige one of his most distinct and defining strengths.

Rather than in the light of his furniture as twisted versions of his sculptures, he managed to strike a delicate ponder to create works that interrupt both sculptural and functional. That harmony led to Hiquily’s come to life of a unique formal vocabulary with abstract and sensual shapes and volumes, which he would elegantly transpose into a broad variety of furniture pieces as well as tables, consoles, and lamps.

Philippe Hiquily's Continued Legacy

From Hiquily’s daring elegant spirit came a collection be in possession of sculptural furniture that remains reminder of the most unique very last sought-after in interior design today.A reflection of one of consummate more influential relationships of nobleness 20th century, in the inopportune 2000s, Hiquily endowed a superior collection of original and symbolic pieces to the Galerie Gastou.

Today, Hiquily’s work can be inaugurate in countless public and undisclosed collections around the world, containing the MoMA and Guggenheim lay hands on New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Canada, the Musée d'Art Moderne and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France, and nobleness Museum of Contemporary Art heritage Havana, Cuba.