Clémence and Didier Krzentowski established Galerie kreo in 1999 in the rue Louise Weiss, an unprepossessing area of eastern Paris. They joined a group of galleries focused on French contemporary art that left the high rents of the Marais in the city centre behind and moved into a building leased cheaply to them by the government. At a time when the Parisian art scene had become something of a back water eclipsed by London, Berlin and New York, rue Louise Weiss turned into a thriving platform for new work. “I won’t go so far as to say that it stopped us being ashamed of being French when it came to contemporary art, but it certainly gave us a reason to hope,” one gallery owner described the project later when the artists’ attention had moved to other areas of Paris.
Galerie kreo brought something new to the mix of contemporary culture: design. Its opening exhibition was titled Furniture and Objects 1960-2000 and mixed vintage pieces followed by new work from such designers as Marc Newson and Ron Arad. The gallery developed a distinctive personality, offering design from the recent past, particularly lighting from France and Italy, dating between 1945 and 1985 but also by working with contemporary designers to produce limited editions. Galerie kreo stands out from other galleries that offer what was sometimes called design art, a blurry category that sometimes fails to be either. The designers it works with belong almost exclusively to the mainstream of industrial design. Jasper Morrison, for example, who had his first solo exhibition with kreo in 2006, has produced flat screen televisions for Sony, cameras for Canon and furniture for Muji. Like Morrison, Konstantin Grcic, who was Morrison’s first assistant, has also been involved with mass production. This experience gives both designers an insight into the potential of industrial materials and technology. Morrison designed the Air Chair for Magis, which has been made in the hundreds of thousands. It depends on industrial gas-blown plastic moulding techniques, developed to make cheap components for car interiors, that require no finishing or manual work, which allows them to sell for £118 each. Morrison’s Carraratable collection for kreo is put together by hand and made from aluminium honeycomb and marble in an edition of just 12, along with what is known as a prototype, or artist's proof, and is available for up to £43,000.
The concept of the limited edition comes from the early days of printing and moulding techniques, when each impression caused a slight drop off in quality as the copper plate was brought into con-tact with the paper, or each time a mould was used to make a cast. Translating the concept of the edition to contemporary design is not an exact match. It is not about avoiding a deterioration in the sharpness of an impression. Limited editions reflect the experimental nature of the pieces which cannot be mass-produced at reasonable prices. An edition allows for designers to experiment with what is possible without the constraints of mass production You can use a Carrara table as a stand for a stereo system, to hold a vase or a framed photograph, but if you could afford to buy one, its role in a domestic interior would go beyond its practical purpose. Even as a child, Jasper Morrison understood that some objects and certain pieces of furniture could create what he calls “an atmosphere” that put him in a good frame of mind. He remembers a room in his grandfather’s house as the first modern space that he ever encountered. He noticed that it had bare floorboards, a shag pile rug and a Dieter Rams designed Braun radiogram, a line-up that he later realised was the result of his grandfather’s prolonged exposure toDenmark. “It was an early revelation that a space like that could make you feel better. Subliminally I knew I felt good or bad in a place instantly. Discovering that design can cause a change in the atmosphere of a place was vital. Function can be handled, but the atmosphere of an object is its most important quality.” For Morrison, and other designers from his generation such as Tom Dixon and Ron Arad who began their careers in the London of the 1980s, making furniture themselves in very small numbers was a necessity. There were no manufacturers interested in working with them. So, Ron Arad started by salvaging seats from Rover cars, Tom Dixon taught himself to weld, and Morrison made 20 examples of a side table using two sets of bicycle handlebar sat each end of a plank. One set to stand on, the other to hold up the glass tabletop. It was a witty reminder of Marcel Breuer’s first cantilevered steel chair that had been inspired by the Adler bicycle that he rode around Dessau while teaching at the Bauhaus. And it paid Morrison’s rent for a while.
Grcic, who designs mass-produced furniture for Vitra and lighting for Flos, but like Morrison also has a sensibility that brings him close to the art world, used to compare the design of editioned pieces to the relationship between working on a Formula 1 car, made each year in low single figures and producing a high-volume production car. There are technologies to be transferred and concepts to be shared.But Clémence Krzentowski has another explanation for the appeal that producing a collection with kreo has for the designers that they work with regularly. Against a background in which many product categories, from cameras to music systems and TV sets, have dissolved into the digital cloud, working with physical objects with people who care about the way in which they are made remains important for designers. And even in the furniture world, many companies no longer maintain the same direct relationships with designers that they once had.
Galerie kreo has been shaped by Didier Krzentowski’s lifelong passion for collecting. He started by assembling a collection of key rings and then of watches as a child. Early on he bought a complete series of Nan Goldin photographs from her first show in Paris and has been accumulating art ever since. At various times he has collected flint tools, lesser-known Hermès bags from 1950 to 1980, and the furniture of Pierre Paulin. He told Alice Rawsthorn from the New YorkTimes that he had originally planned to build a modern chair collection but discovered it was too late – Rolf Fehlbaum, founder of the Vitra Design Museum had beaten him to it. After he acquired a Verner Panton Wire lamp, better described as secondhand rather than vintage given that it was made as recently as 1972, Krzentowski realised that 20th-century lighting was still unclaimed territory. Since then, he has built up more than 800 examples of lights of all kinds going back to the 1950s. A Swiss publisher has produced two books documenting it.
Clémence Krzentowski was working for the Winter Olympics in France in 1992 when she had the idea of commissioning Philippe Starck to design the torch. After the games, Didier and Clémence set up a consultancy together that choreographed commercial partnerships for designers, such as the Ricard branded carafe and pitcher, respectively by Garouste & Bonettiand Marc Newson, produced for the past is maker. But Didier spent more and more time haunting showrooms and flea markets to pursue his collecting obsession, and Galerie kreo became all consuming. It was successful enough to move from its original home to a much larger space on the rue Dauphine in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, close to the Seine, in 2008. They took over what had been Ruby's, a night-club on the ground floor of the Hôtel de Mouy, a grand late 17th-century townhouse.
The gallery’s philosophy has been to produce new collections of work with individual designers, and to intersperse them with group shows that mix the well established with newcomers. It is a chance to find new talent, without imposing the pressure of a solo show on less experienced designers.
Along with Marc Newson, Jasper Morrison and Konstantin Grcic, kreo has built up long-term relationships with both Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Hella Jongerius and Ed Barber and Jay Osgerby, among others. And in 2020 they staged Efflorescence, a solo show with Virgil Abloh, at the time working for Louis Vuitton’s menswear collections.
The Krzentowskis were close to Azzedine Alaïa and his approach to fashion, but had been careful to avoid their collections being co-opted by a prominent fashion label. With Abloh, who had trained as an architect and was himself a serious collector of contemporary design, it was clear that was not the intention. Design fascinated him, and Abloh brought his own distinctive sensibility to the project.
After Abloh’s sadly early death in 2021, kreo brought together Echosystems, a remarkable celebration of his life and influences from skateboard to graffiti, art from Gordon Matta-Clark and Jean-Michel Basquiat as well as design by Tom Dixon, Jerszy Seymour and the Bouroullecs. In a sense it was also a summation of Abloh, and of the unique achievement of Galerie kreo.
This feature appeared in Issue 2 of Anima, head here to purchase a copy or subscribe