During its third exhibition at Galerie Joyce in Paris, artist Garnier & Linker reveal a new limited-edition collection of lighting and mirrors that features the workshop’s research and craftsmanship. This collection showcases the beauty of its raw materials, namely bronze and pâte de verre. Each item, as well as their wax casts, was designed at the Garnier & Linker’s workshop, located in the Parisian suburbs.
Exhibition on view until the end of March.
Galerie Joyce
168, galerie de Valois – Jardin du Palais Royal, 75001 Paris.
About Garnier & Linker
What better setting than the Ecole Camondo for the meeting of two lovers of the Decorative Arts? Guillaume Garnier and Florent Linker formed a duo in their first year at the school of architecture and design, located in Paris. Here they received a well-rounded, comprehensive education that would shape their career for many years in the future.
As well as developing a passion for the Art Deco movement, they grew fond of working with materials and crafts, and, more broadly, a certain art of living à la française – a lifestyle in equal parts cultured, delicate and precise, in keeping with the likes of Pierre Chareau and Jean-Michel Frank. Sculpture provided another source of inspiration, greatly influencing the pair’s work with raw materials and the creation of effects on pure forms.
After leaving Camondo, the pair refined their talents with India Madhavi and Studio KO, meeting craftsmen with whom they would later collaborate for a collection of lighting fixtures, all of which were unique pieces either made to measure or forming parts of small series.
Marblers, cabinetmakers, bronze smiths, stonemasons, glassmakers… A love for excellence pushes Guillaume and Florent to collaborate with renowned craftsmen recruited from all over France, who help complete the pair’s projects in their Parisian workshop.
The development follows a unique process: for each design, Garnier & Linker produce a 1:1 scale model in wax, plaster, clay, wood or resin, before the final stage of manufacturing. This guarantees total control of the final product, allowing the pair to make the necessary changes until the last stages of the development process.
Through their lighting fixtures, Garnier & Linker take infinite pleasure in revealing rare, rich and raw materials: alabaster, travertine, casting, bronze, plaster… Every year they exhibit their designs on the fringes of the PAD art fair, except this year, which saw them travel to the Milan Furniture Fair where they presented their Kitayama collection of Japanese cedar furniture.
Above fashion and full of vigour, Garnier & Linker’s work is mainly aimed at a clientele of architects and decorators such as Studio KO and Pierre Yovanovitch, who value the pair’s style – an integral part of the history of decorative arts – and eagerly await their latest designs. The duo now welcomes its clients in a spacious Haussmann-style apartment in the centre of Paris, a space they have transformed into a studio and showroom – an ideal setting in which to showcase their timeless vision of the decorative arts.
Photos Mathieu Lavanchy and Aurelien Mole, courtesy of Garnier & Linker
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