Lee Mindel: Speaking From Experience
This architect has done it all, and in style. On this episode, Dan speaks with Mindel about getting his start, his design gallery, and meeting Gaetano Pesce in a hospital waiting room.
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For decades, the French design house of Liaigre has been the go-to for designers, collectors, hoteliers, and aficionados looking for a refined approach to furniture and interiors. And while many brands flirt and collaborate with the art world, Liaigre’s approach has set them apart. Its in-house art curator, Carlos Sicilia, has spearheaded exhibitions for the brand’s global showrooms, including the house’s now-iconic flagship on Paris’s Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, partnering with blue-chip galleries such as Galerie Lelong and Templon in the process. The latest show is “I Remembered to Forget” by American artist Rob Wynne on Madison Avenue in New York, open until October 10th, and which Sicilia calls his most Baroque exhibition to date. It sees the showroom punctuated with Wynne’s playful hand-poured glass artwork. “Often, clients come to the showroom with a design project in mind,” says Sicilia, who worked on the project with Galerie Mitterrand. “And very often they leave having discovered an artist.” I asked the resident curator and native Parisian about his approach, the challenges of the untraditional space, and plans for the future. —Dan Rubinstein
Art has always been in Liaigre’s DNA, but you’ve transformed that relationship. How did the curation start and what has it come to mean for the house?
Art brings a soul to Liaigre. After joining the architecture team in 2014, I started developing a program of art exhibitions and collaborations—it really started when Liaigre opened the four-level showroom on Faubourg Saint-Honoré that today has dedicated spaces to exhibit art. Over time, we’ve developed relationships with leading galleries and the art market. This approach is different from that of a traditional gallery, which can sometimes feel inaccessible to clients unversed in the contemporary art world. Contemporary art also helps the company connect with younger clients. Each time we do an opening, it brings with it a new audience.
What was the brand’s first show in 2018?
Our first show was a collaboration with Galerie Lelong, featuring artists like Kiki Smith, Fabienne Verdier, Georg Baselitz, and David Nash. Through the years, we’ve developed more ambitious projects, like Tadashi Kawamata’s “nest” of wooden chairs on the flagship’s facade in 2023.
Liaigre is known for its refined aesthetic. How does this translate into the talents you select?
I try to bring new artists to Liaigre that really make contemporary art, not only something decorative that looks good above a sofa. I’m interested in artists who combine a strong aesthetic vision and a radical approach, just like the legacy of Christian Liaigre himself. I’ve worked with artists, like David Nash, who work with wood—while each artist has their own universe, you can see the main common language of material, space, forms, and geometry.
Has it been a challenge to convince such respected artists to collaborate with a design brand, sometimes for the first time?
It’s not always easy. Sometimes emerging artists are more hesitant to exhibit in a place that’s not a gallery or museum, but more established artists can be more agreeable, typically because they have nothing to prove. With Wynne, for example, he’s in his 70s and was eager to collaborate. Like all our artists, he had a hand in approving exactly how the works were chosen and placed in the space.
What’s next for you?
I find that each city has its personality and approach to art in terms of what they respond to, so I try to connect Liaigre with the local identity. To that end, we have an upcoming exhibition in Paris at our Rue du Bac showroom in October, and crucially an exhibition in Miami coinciding with Art Basel in December, with Haitian-born, Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier. I met him last year and found his work very poetic because it’s related to nature, the identity of Miami, and the different layers of the city.
This interview was edited and condensed.
A Japanese Powerhouse Takes a Stand in London, Discover the Work of the Other Duchamp, a Design Duo Brings a New Aesthetic to Gotham
London, “Yoshitomo Nara” (Until Aug. 31)
The popularity of Nara’s child-like characters often obscures the histories of isolation, cultural dispersion, and resistance behind them. Nara arrived in Düsseldorf from Japan in 1988 unable to speak the language, turning to painting as a form of communication. He had grown up in Japan’s rural Tōhoku region, often alone, listening to the American military’s Far East Network at a time when the country was being inundated by American pop culture. Nara’s big-eyed, unsmiling figures first appeared in the early 1990s, subverting the sanitized cuteness of kawaii. Later, disasters like the 2011 earthquake and Fukushima meltdown shifted his work toward vulnerability and grief. This exhibition—his first UK solo show at a public institution—traces four decades of paintings, drawings, and sculpture. southbankcentre.co.uk
Aspen, “Sherrie Levine: 1977-1988” (Until Sept. 29)
“I like to think of my paintings as membranes permeable from both sides,” Sherrie Levine wrote in 1985. “So there is an easy flow between the past and future, between my history and yours.” By then, she had reproduced Walker Evans’ photographs and Van Goghs. She would paint, quite poetically, the knots in plywood boards and cast Duchamp’s infamous urinal in bronze. Born in Pennsylvania and educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Levine joined the rising ranks of appropriation artists in the East Village in the ’80s. Her earliest works were a feminist refusal to “originate” anything in a world built by men. Instead, her copies discomfort the question of authorship. Now, the Aspen Art Museum surveys the first decade of Levine’s output—photographs, paintings, and sculptures from 1977 to 1988—in her first major museum show in over a decade. aspenartmuseum.org
Los Angeles, “Noah Davis” (Until Aug. 31)
“I want to change the way people view art, the way they buy art, the way they make art,” said Noah Davis. In 2012, the American artist and his wife Karon opened the Underground Museum in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles and secured a loan from MOCA to show blue-chip contemporary art in the converted storefront. Before his premature death in 2015 at 32, David had planned a full exhibition program of 18 shows. The respected painter also left behind an unforgettable body of work, at once figurative and surreal. This first institutional survey of over 50 of his works makes a homecoming. hammer.ucla.edu
New York, “Formation” (Until Aug. 1)
“It’s fine to design a chair,” Andrea Trimarchi said in 2016, “but then one should consider the whole process, from how a tree is grown, to the mining and value of a particular metal.” Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, the pair behind the design studio Formafantasma, have spent fifteen years investigating these very systems, from the trade of obsidian to the afterlife of e-waste. For the Italian studio’s U.S. solo debut, a collection of furniture and lighting examines the history embedded in materials—from the Shakers’ use of cherry wood to the domestic history of woven textiles. friedmanbenda.com
Zürich, “Suzanne Duchamp” (Until Sept. 7)
Suzanne Duchamp’s career has been largely eclipsed by her famous older brothers. Yet, she helped to shape the landscape of Dada, particularly women’s involvement in the movement. Her early experiments with Cubism gave way to Dada’s irreverence, when she wrote poetic titles over her mesmerizing abstract forms. Then in 1922, she pivoted again, adopting a figurative style rich with irony and naïve charm. Duchamp’s oeuvre has long been treasured by insiders but remained little known to wider audiences. Now, the first comprehensive retrospective of her work rediscovers an artist whose artistic disruptions still resonate. kunsthaus.ch
