Five New Galleries At PAD London
PAD London (8-13 October) is where more than 60 top design galleries come together to show 20th-century and contemporary design, in a distinctive temporary venue in Berkeley Square. D/A UK picks five newcomers on which to train your collector’s eye…
Aequō
India’s first collectible design gallery was founded in Mumbai in 2022, and has a unique voice that combines native traditions with contemporary form. “Each piece on the stand highlights the incredible craftsmanship of India’s artisans, who are renowned for their expertise, and we are proud to be able to present their skills to an international audience,” says founder Tarini Jindal Handa. For PAD, Æquo’s creative director Florence Louisy has collaborated with illustrator Boris Brucher, with Bidri silverwork creating a delicate linear outline of a Karnataka landscape across Louisy’s Pila screens. Other pieces by Louisy, such as her cast metal Tavit chais, will also be on show. Look out, too, for three new cast bronze and copper enamel furniture pieces made with US designer Kelly Wearstler, the prelude to a larger show in Mumbai in 2025.
Brazil Modernist
Based between Paris and São Paulo, Brazil Modernist highlights the work of great 20th-century masters alongside contemporary names. At PAD, on the contemporary side, architect and designer Juliana Vasconcellos explores traditional materials though pieces such as the Juta bench, whose button-like, jute-wrapped seat pads sit on top of a contrastingly austere freijo wood frame, while Tiago Braga connects to his home town of Osório’s craft traditions with work in chunky felted natural wool. These pieces are being shown alongside work from Brazilian artist Carolina Semiatzh, drawings by Oscar Niemeyer, and sculptures and ceramics by the artists of Brazil’s indigenous Wauja Community.
Charles Burnand
Simon Stewart of Charles Burnand is a familiar face on London’s design scene, with a feted gallery in Fitzrovia and some of the world’s best interior designers as his clients. For its PAD debut, the gallery is showing a stable of work from several makers, with innovative combinations of materials, forms and scales the thread that runs through it all. The intricacy of Heechan Kim’s sculpture deserves to be seen at close quarters, made from hundreds of slices of ash, pierced by tiny copper pins; while there’s more organic-looking form – and painstaking process – courtesy of duo Deglan (architects Domenic Degner and Falko Landenberger), with their furniture made from timber coated in layer after layer of lime plaster to achieve an amorphous appearance.
Pradier-Jeauneau
Aurélien Jeauneau and Jérémy Pradier once ran an antique shop in Paris’ famed Puces de Saint-Ouen, but now they sell work both old and new via their gallery, Pradier-Jeauneau. Their new collection is a collaboration with French designer Axel Chay, which combines rich Vosges oak, aluminium and upholstery to create furniture and lighting that sits somewhere between Eileen Gray and the Memphis movement. Across the collection, triangles clash with tubes: there’s a totem-like bookshelf, a stone-topped coffee table on a base of serpentine tubular aluminium and a 1970s-meets-deco floor lamp with glass globes held aloft on U-shaped aluminium branches. Also on show is work from Isabelle Stanislas, Anthony Guerrée and Mathieu Delacroix.
Theoreme Editions
Theoreme Editions, founded by David Giroire and Jérôme Bazzocchi, works with contemporary designers at the heart of France’s nouvelle vague movement, including Emmanuelle Simon and Joris Poggioli. At PAD it is unveiling its Sistema sofas, a modular system of seven pieces, each with round-edged forms that pleasingly tessellate, upholstered in wool and alpaca that amplifies the softness of the chunky shapes. A chair in folded aluminium – very much the material of the moment – by Exercice will sit alongside.