Hubert Le Gall: Sculpture, Furniture and a Hidden Studio in Montmartre

ART & CULTURE · PARIS

Reading time: 10 min

Behind an unmarked gate in Montmartre, in a courtyard once worked by Pierre Bonnard and Salvador Dalí, Hubert Le Gall casts bronze whales, gilds cabinets shaped like bulls, and argues, piece by piece, that furniture and sculpture were never really separate disciplines. He is self-taught, represented by galleries on three continents, and was Maison et Objet’s Designer of the Year in 2012. His studio visit found the argument still being made in bronze, resin and wood.

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Hubert Le Gall works from an atelier in Montmartre, Paris, reached through a gate that gives no indication of what is behind it. Inside is a courtyard of studios and gardens that has sheltered painters for more than a century, and inside that, a workshop lined with plaster casts, paintbrushes and offcuts of wood, alongside the finished bronze, resin and steel pieces that have made Le Gall one of French design’s most distinctive furniture makers. Born in Lyon in 1961, entirely self-taught, and without formal training in either sculpture or design, he has spent close to three decades building a body of work that refuses to sit still inside either category.

He was named Designer of the Year at Maison et Objet in 2012, the fair’s own recognition of a body of work that by then already included the whale-shaped armchairs, gilded animal cabinets and oversized mirrors that remain his signature. That title sits at the centre of how his work is generally introduced, and it deserves the space it gets. But it is also six years old by the time this piece was researched, which is a reminder that Le Gall’s more interesting story is not a single fair appearance. It is a working practice, run out of one hidden Paris courtyard, that has been quietly reshaping what a piece of furniture is allowed to look like since the mid-1990s.

A self-taught path from economics to bronze

Le Gall did not train as a sculptor or a furniture designer. He studied economics and business management before moving to Paris in 1983, and his route into three-dimensional work began sideways, through painting and portraiture rather than through any design school. He has been open about resisting the label that most naturally applies to him: “I don’t see myself as a designer because I have more an artistic approach than a design approach.”

The pivot came in the mid-1990s, when the gallerist Elisabeth Delacarte saw his early sculptural work and gave him his first exhibition at Galerie Avant-Scène, the Paris gallery that still represents him today, three decades on, with pieces including the Le Temps des Amours armchair, the Agathe mirror and the Pégase secretaire currently in its collection. That first show introduced the daisy-shaped tables and flower-topped commodes, drawing directly on Andy Warhol’s flower prints and on the sculptor Jean-Pierre Raynaud’s work, that established the vocabulary Le Gall has been elaborating ever since: familiar, often botanical or animal forms, rebuilt at a scale and in a material that makes them strange again.

The atelier hidden behind Montmartre’s gates

Le Gall’s studio sits behind an unassuming façade near Montmartre Cemetery, in one of the walled artists’ courtyards built into that side of the hill in the early twentieth century. Multiple accounts of his practice describe the atelier as the former studio of the Post-Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard, and note that Salvador Dalí also worked from the same complex. That detail is not incidental colour. The geography it describes, a gated courtyard of studios that runs down to meet the cemetery wall, matches the Cité des Fusains on rue Tourlaque exactly: a hidden Montmartre artists’ enclave where Bonnard rented a studio in 1911 and where Dalí, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Max Ernst, Joan Miró and André Masson all worked at various points across the early to mid-twentieth century, a roll call that places the site alongside the more famous Bateau-Lavoir in the history of Montmartre’s studios. Le Gall now works inside that same lineage of hidden, gated ateliers, in a courtyard that hosts gardens, workshops and sculpture alongside his own studio.

Inside, the workshop reads as a working archive rather than a showroom. Paint-splattered shelving holds a treasure trove of source material, model hands, skull-shaped vessels, paintbrushes and offcuts of wood among it, the raw vocabulary from which finished pieces are eventually built. Beyond the main studio sits a separate storage facility and showroom, where completed works in bronze, wood, resin, steel and aluminium are shown together, and behind all of it, hidden gardens that most visitors to Montmartre would have no reason to know exist.

Where sculpture and furniture stop being different things

Le Gall’s central argument, repeated across three decades of work, is that the line between sculpture and furniture is a false one, provided the furniture still does its job. “If I create a chair,” he has said, “it must be possible to sit on it.” That single condition is what separates his work from pure sculpture dressed up as design: every whale-shaped armchair still holds a sitter, every animal-headed cabinet still opens its drawers, every mirror still reflects. He has described the resulting objects as sitting deliberately “in between”, neither fully sculpture nor fully furniture, built to create what he calls a poetic parenthesis: a moment where an object’s identity shifts and a viewer has to look again.

His reference points are as likely to come from art history as from furniture history. He draws on Pop Art, Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein among his stated influences, alongside the decorative grammar of the Grand Siècle, the Enlightenment, Pompeian ornament and the Neo-Gothic, and on the Surrealists, Dalí and Max Ernst chief among them, whose presence in the same Montmartre courtyard now reads less like coincidence and more like inheritance. What holds all of it together is scale and material inversion: a daisy grown to the size of a coffee table, a whale rebuilt as an armchair, a bull’s head cast in bronze and gold leaf to frame a set of drawers. Nothing in the work pretends to be naturalistic. Its logic is childhood logic, oversized, playful and entirely sincere about it.

The pieces that define his language

The vocabulary is easiest to see in specific pieces. The Cabinet Taureau (2002) casts a bull’s form in patinated and gilded bronze, its black and gold palette a direct reference to Boulle marquetry and its detailing drawn from Pompeian ornament, so that a genuinely ancient decorative language ends up framing a set of everyday drawers. The Mahjong cabinet (2010), made in an edition of eight, pairs brushed stainless steel with Macassar ebony, setting an industrial material against a luxury one inside a single, quietly restrained silhouette. The Baleine, or Whale armchair, upholstered in stitched fabric over foam and standing 110 centimetres tall, turns a marine mammal into a genuinely comfortable seat rather than a novelty object.

Mirrors recur throughout his output, most notably the Mulus mirror (2001), framed in gilded bronze and gold leaf, and the Saint-Calais mirror (2014), a unique piece in which a rabbit named Odilon doubles as a candelabrum, its ears rising from a bed of acanthus leaves. His Fleur Anthémis coffee tables (2013) return to the Warhol-inflected daisy motif that first appeared in the 1990s, and the Odette ostrich lamps (2016 to 2017) extend the same animal logic into lighting. Editions are deliberately small, generally eight or twenty-five pieces, a limit that keeps each object closer to a sculpture edition than to a furniture production run.

Maison et Objet’s Designer of the Year, and what that title actually means

When Maison et Objet named Le Gall its Designer of the Year in January 2012, the honour came with a dedicated presentation inside the fair’s Scènes d’Intérieur programme, built around new pieces including the Lucien le Magicien and Pif Paf le Fakir chandeliers, the Spot Dog lamp and the Placide de Lapin Câlin armchair, shown alongside earlier signature works. It remains the clearest institutional recognition of his practice, and the title is still the shorthand most often used to introduce him.

It is worth being precise about what that title covers, because Maison et Objet runs twice a year, every January and September, and a designer of the year is honoured at a specific edition rather than granted a standing annual slot at the fair thereafter. Le Gall’s Montmartre studio has continued producing new work in the years since, for private clients, for galleries and for institutional commissions, largely independent of any single Maison et Objet appearance. The title describes a genuine and significant moment in his career. It does not describe the whole of what has happened in his atelier since.

A team of four, and how the objects actually get made

Le Gall works with a close-knit team of four, a scale that has stayed constant even as his commissions have grown more ambitious. One long-serving studio assistant trained at the École Boulle, the Paris school that has trained cabinetmakers and furniture craftspeople since 1886, which grounds the studio’s more sculptural ambitions in a genuinely traditional cabinetmaking discipline. Bronze pieces are cast and then patinated or gilded by hand; wood is carved, in some pieces in a diamond-point pattern that catches the light across a whole cabinet front; resin, steel and aluminium are worked for pieces where a lighter or more contemporary finish suits the form better than bronze would.

The studio has also taken its material language into collaborations outside its own furniture line. In 2015, working with the champagne house Ruinart, Le Gall produced twelve illuminated Murano glass sculptures, one for each month, in black, green, yellow and clear glass, inspired by the Sillery vineyards and intended to hold both nature and the human control of it, and the passage of time, in a single object. It is the same logic that runs through his furniture: take a real, specific reference, and rebuild it in a material chosen for what it can make visible.

From private commissions to a cathedral in Chartres

Le Gall’s exhibition scenography work runs in parallel with his furniture, and has taken him into some of France’s largest cultural institutions, including the Musée d’Orsay and the Grand Palais, a practice that began with the curator Sylvain Bellenger at the Musée de Blois in the mid-1990s. His furniture and sculpture are held in the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, La Piscine in Roubaix, the Musée Mandet and Château Borély, and he was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2009 in recognition of the same body of work.

The most unexpected recent commission sits well outside a gallery or a private interior altogether. In October 2020, Le Gall designed the new display case for the Veil of the Virgin, one of the most precious relics held at Chartres Cathedral, working to conservation specifications set by the regional cultural authority for Centre-Val de Loire, with the case itself fabricated by the Milan specialist Goppion and its decorative glass elements made by the Chartres glassworking studio Loire. It is a long way, in subject matter and in constraint, from a gilded bronze whale armchair, and it is a useful reminder of how wide a self-taught practice can eventually reach when it starts from a single, consistently applied idea: that an object can be exactly what it needs to be and still carry a second, more playful identity underneath.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to file Hubert Le Gall under his best-known credit and leave it there: Maison et Objet’s Designer of the Year, 2012 edition. That title is real, it is significant, and it remains the fastest way to place him inside French design’s recent history. But a single fair appearance, however prestigious, is not what has kept his atelier running for three decades in the same hidden Montmartre courtyard.

What has kept it running is a genuinely consistent idea, applied with unusual patience: that a chair can still be a chair while also being a whale, that a cabinet can still hold drawers while wearing a bull’s gilded head, and that none of this requires abandoning craft for spectacle. The bronze is still cast and patinated by hand. The editions are still kept small enough to matter. The same four-person team that built the pieces shown at Maison et Objet in 2012 is, by most accounts, still the team building the pieces today.

That is the more durable story sitting inside the thin, well-worn framing. A designer of the year is a moment. A studio that has spent thirty years in a courtyard once worked by Bonnard and Dalí, quietly proving that sculpture and furniture were never really separate disciplines, is a practice. Le Gall’s work is best understood as the second thing, with the first as one very good chapter inside it.