Elizabeth Garouste, Au fil de l’eau: KETABI BOURDET - 22, PASSAGE DAUPHINE 75006 PARIS

Bringing together a previously unseen body of recent creations, the exhibition reveals a poetic universe in which furniture, sculptures, lighting, masks and drawings engage in dialogue around a shared imaginary world: that of the sea, its creatures and its metamorphoses.

A major figure in French design for over forty years, Elizabeth Garouste emerged in the 1980s alongside Mattia Bonetti as one of the most distinctive personalities of her generation. Together, they profoundly renewed the language of contemporary furniture, moving away from functionalism to develop a free, theatrical and deeply narrative vocabulary. Their creations are now held in the collections of leading international institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

With Au fil de l’eau, Elizabeth Garouste continues a more personal exploration, in which the boundaries between design, sculpture and drawing gradually dissolve.

The exhibition brings together unique pieces in resin, ceramic, bronze, painted wood and metal, which appear less manufactured than shaped by the elements themselves. Here, the furniture does not represent nature: it seems to have emerged from it. Bases become corals, frames transform into seaweed and lighting fixtures evoke living organisms, as though each work had slowly grown on the ocean floor.

The Fucus mirror, whose painted-resin frame undulates like seaweed carried by the currents, acts as a window opening onto this underwater world. The Atoll daybed, upholstered in deep blues and greens and resting on wrought-iron feet, evokes an island suspended between lagoon and reef. The Corail console, with its spectacular resin base and painted-wood top, appears to have been slowly formed through accumulation, like a genuine coral colony. The lighting pieces extend this organic universe: the Bord de mer lamp, modelled in ceramic, recalls the porous forms of shells and sponges, while the Posidonie lamp, made of resin set with semi-precious stones, causes light to emerge from an interlacing of seagrass. Each piece appears to belong to the same ecosystem, in which the boundaries between object, sculpture and living organism gradually disappear.

The masks and drawings occupy an essential place within this body of work. They constitute the laboratory of forms from which the furniture and sculptures emerge, while asserting their own artistic autonomy. Hybrid figures, fantastical fish, aquatic vegetation, reefs, corals and imaginary creatures invade the paper before migrating into three dimensions. The same sinuous lines, organic silhouettes and metamorphoses thus run throughout the exhibition, revealing a creative process in which drawing never illustrates the furniture but instead constitutes its origin.

Informed by traditional arts, Art Brut and folk forms, this imaginary world is reinvented through a deeply personal vision of nature. The marine universe becomes a territory of freedom in which the utilitarian object transforms into a creature, decoration becomes landscape and each work appears animated by a life of its own.

Through this new exhibition, Elizabeth Garouste invites us to follow the movement of water as a metaphor for creation: fluid, unpredictable and in a state of perpetual transformation. Like reefs that slowly take shape, the silent growth of seaweed or the imperceptible movements of the tides, her works appear to evolve according to their own organic laws. Furniture therefore ceases to be solely functional and becomes the vehicle for a narrative, an imaginary world and an emotion. 

With Au fil de l’eau, Elizabeth Garouste presents one of her freest and most poetic bodies of work, confirming the essential place she occupies in the history of contemporary design today.