Curated by Cloé Pitiot

A woman in a man’s profession, Eileen Gray was both celebrated and sidelined by her male colleagues (most famously Le Corbusier) as she navigated the exclusive world of fashionable salons with the detachment of a self-declared outsider. But even more intriguing was the Anglo-Irish designer’s brilliant, if seemingly contradictory, design intelligence—one she applied with equal ease whether producing the lush Art Deco interiors of her early career or the spare and highly disciplined modernist architectonics of her houses in the late 1920s and ’30s. It is this spectrum that the Pompidou aims to examine in full with a comprehensive retrospective, featuring some seventy works in media ranging from textiles and lacquerwork to steel tubing and reinforced concrete. Reconstituting the environments Gray herself inhabited as well as those she designed for others, this survey promises to show, finally, that her work was about not only making and using but also the sensual pleasure to be derived from objects and environments designed foremost to perform.

— Eve Blau