Christie’s is not where one expects to encounter mounds of sand and a floor suspended on steel grids. Yet this month, the auction house’s pristine white-walled gallery space in Los Angeles has been transformed into an extremely stylish excavation site.
The dramatic installation is the stage for “Lightness & Tension,” a two-person design exhibition organized by collector and curator Ulysses de Santi that explores how a new generation is toying with and inverting the legacy of Brazilian modernist design. At a moment when there is much hand-wringing around the state of the art market, design has emerged as an unusually resilient sector.
The show, on view through Sept. 19, places work by the late Joaquim Tenreiro, widely regarded as the father of Modern Brazilian furniture, alongside the debut design collection of the contemporary Brazilian artist Lucas Simões.
The pairing is unexpected. Tenreiro, who died in 1992, challenged prevailing fashions by rejecting a highly ornamental colonial aesthetic in favor of airy structures and clean lines. His embrace of native raw materials like jacaranda and peroba helped shape our understanding of Brazilian design. Key works on view at Christie’s include his two-seat bench, a dining set, and a one-of-one mounted sideboard.
Having trained as an architect before pursuing sculpture, Simões—who also developed the exhibition design for the Christie’s show—felt furniture was a natural progression. While he embraces very different materials from Tenreiro, including concrete and stainless steel, both share a gift for keen proportions and elegant silhouettes.
“There’s a beautiful sense of contradiction with this exhibition,” says de Santi. “Tenreiro is known for balance and weightlessness, precision and restraint. Simões, on the other hand fearlessly leans into material rupture and architectural tension.” Together, he continues, their work offers “a powerful encapsulation of Brasil’s design legacy.”
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