Ingrid Donat - Design New York Thursday, June 6, 2019 | Phillips

Design

New York Auction 6 June 2019

  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the designer by the present owner

  • Literature

    Anne Bony, Ingrid Donat, Paris, 2016, p. 103

  • Catalogue Essay

    French-Swedish artist Ingrid Donat has lived and worked in Paris since she moved there to study sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1975. Following this formal artistic education, she soon found mentors in Sylva Bernt (the partner of André Arbus) as well as Diego Giacometti, who introduced her to the art of cast bronze furniture and encouraged her to create her own designs.

    Donat prefers an open-ended, creative approach to designing furniture; beginning by carving and engraving wax panels in a gestural manner not unlike drawing, she allows the patterns that emerge to dictate the eventual forms of the cast bronze furniture, lending a warm, tactile quality to an otherwise cold and heavy material. Donat’s patterning draws inspiration from the subtle details and craftsmanship of Art Deco design, as well as tribal tattoos, among other sources. “For me,” she has written, “I like the idea that tribal art has an instinctive quality, like folk art, and is independent of the formal academics of Western art. I am drawn to the African tradition of scarification—creating marks upon skin—and the intricate repetition of a graphic motif, which translates well to bronze.”

    In 2005 Donat made a conscious shift towards abstraction in her work, eschewing figurative references (bronze caryatids having previously played a prominent role in her furniture) for minimalist designs. The present commode, created in 2013, falls into this latter category. In its form and galuchat-style patterning, it clearly references André Groult’s galuchat-covered case pieces of the 1920s. However, not unlike Marc Newson’s Pod of Drawers (1987), with the Commode Galuchat Donat has reinterpreted and built on the Art Deco tradition for a new era of collectors.

  • Artist Biography

    Ingrid Donat

    Swedish • 1957

    Swedish-born Ingrid Donat has lived and worked in Paris since 1975, when she moved there to study sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts. Encounters with Sylva Bernt (the companion of André Arbus) and Diego Giacometti introduced her to the art of cast bronze furniture. Working in this most ancient of artistic media, and drawing inspiration from Art Deco design, Gustav Klimt patterning and tribal tattoos, Donat blends traditional sources to craft refreshingly original and evocative furniture that invites closer inspection.

    View More Works

133

Ingrid Donat

"Commode Galuchat"

2014
Patinated bronze.
36 2/5 x 42 x 15 7/10 in. (92.5 x 106.7 x 39.9 cm)
Produced by Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Cast by Markovstudio, Sofia, Bulgaria. Number 6 from the edition of 8 plus 4 artist’s proofs. Reverse impressed with artist’s cipher, foundry stamp, and cwg-2014-6 / 8.

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for $275,000

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Design

New York Auction 6 June 2019