The furniture brand L'Atelier was founded by Jorge Zalszupin in 1959 and remained under his management until the late 1970s. Known for its use of curved laminated wood and, later, for its innovation with plastic, it started out as a small factory producing elegant modernist furniture and grew into a business with over two hundred employees. Mass-producing irreverent lines of furniture and objects with a futuristic flair, l'Atelier made a contribution to the industrialization of furniture production in Brazil.
This exhibition draws inspiration from the company's catalogues and advertising to propose a dialogue between design, art, and architecture, imbued with the free-spirited and humorous spirit of its founder. In the brand's communication, rationalist principles were infused with playfulness and, at times, irony: under a bold, Pop design identity, compositions combined furniture with abstract and geometric works of art in vibrant colors, lending them a jovial feel.
Set in Zalszupin's home, L'Atelier's modernist furniture interacts with works by artists who were contemporaries of the architect, tied to Constructivism. By uniting art, architecture, graphic design, and furniture design into a single, integrated approach, it was natural for artists from this movement to move between these various disciplines, as was the case with Geraldo de Barros, Hércules Barsotti, Hermelindo Fiaminghi, Lygia Pape, and Maurício Nogueira Lima, among others.
Freedom of thought and action were fundamental values throughout Jorge Zalszupin's career, and this is reflected in the work of L'Atelier where rigor and formal expression live side by side. Sharing the same inclusive spirit, the furniture in this exhibition shares spaces with the geometric abstraction of artists linked to Constructivist principles, but also works by these same artists in moments that they engaged with organic abstraction, new figuration, and Pop.