Hasta La Ideas

French artist Vincent Dubourg‘s metallic furniture pieces that appear to be frozen midway through exploding are being exhibited at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York City.

For the artist’s first solo show in the US, Vortex, four new pieces will be presented alongside four older works across the Midtown Manhattan gallery’s two floors.

They include an addition to his Inner Vortex series, first created in 2013, which features items that look as if they are being sucked into a vortex – a mass of whirling fluid or air.

A buffet version joins two other cabinets, all with squares of aluminium arranged like they are flying off the furniture but held frozen in time.

Dubourg, who frequently works with metal to create deconstructed furniture, described the natural process that informed the designs.

“A vortex whirls in a circular motion, it forms a vacuum, and embodies subjects to its action,” he said. “In water it swirls but what happens beneath the water’s surface is hidden until it resurfaces elsewhere. If it explodes then it reconstructs, and what is absorbed into it is taken to another place.”

Also in the exhibition are items from Dubourg’s 2017 Gaïa Imprint series, named Matsendra, Uttara and Veda.

Each is formed in the artist’s workshop in Creuse, central France, where he gradually embosses melted aluminium. Once the metal is set and hammered out, it forms uneven sheets that evoke the earth’s crust, and are used to create legs and tops for low tables.

“When the metal froze in contact with the air, small reliefs appeared that the light enhanced; the surface is precious and seems unstable,” said a statement from the gallery. “This astonishing magma that simultaneously expanded and was hammered out is as indiscernible as water.”

The Matsyendra table features thick, stubby dark legs patterned by the hammering. Veda features a grid-like top, made up of square metal tiles, while the Uttara coffee table comprises two sheets of metal that peel apart from one another.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery represents a variety of contemporary artists whose work spans the fields of art and design. The gallery was founded in 2006 by childhood friends Julien Lombrail and Loïc Le Gaillard, and was first based in London and Paris, before expanding to New York City in 2015.

Dubourg showcased another series of metal furniture at the London outpost in 2008, which included bronze tables and chairs with indentations of circles and rectangles, and decorations of wispy metal branches.

His sculptural furniture pieces are influenced and the perception of time. “For more than fifteen years, Vincent Dubourg has dealt with form and metamorphosis,” said the gallery.

The Vortex exhibition will be on display from 2 November to 23 December 2017 at Carpenters Workshop Gallery New York, 693 Fifth Avenue.

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