Design in the 1980s was in part a reaction to the flourishing of the furniture industry after the second world war as populations rebuilt their lives. Paolo Pallucco responded to this with a critique of an industry benefiting from the travails of war: he designed a table that looked like a tank; a chair like a machine gun. “His furniture tells a story,” says 30-year-old Paul Bourdet, who will be showing the designer at Tefaf with partner Charlotte Ketabi-Lebard. “It makes fun of the masculine Modernism that was around ”. Pallucco’s most famous piece, a low-slung minimalist chair in metal and leather called Barba d’Argento (designed with Mireille Rivier), recently made €12,500 at a small German auction house.
Bourdet, however, is showing the designer’s last work: nine chairs from a series called 100 sedie in una notte made in 1990. Pallucco had closed his factory by then and instead made these items in wood, painted black. With their dramatically curved backs, swooping arms
and slender expressive legs, they look like dancers silhouetted on a stage.
“The great thing about the Eighties is that there’s a lot out there awaiting dis- covery,” says art adviser Simon Andrews.
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