Carpenters Workshop Gallery

In 2006, young French art entrepreneurs Julien Lombrail and Loic Le Gaillard moved to London to open their cutting-edge design/art Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Collaborating with designers doing art and artists doing design, they produced “manifesto-objects” to great success. With London locations in both Chelsea and Mayfair, they’re now setting up back in their hometown. CWG’s Paris gallery, on the edge of the Marais, opens Sept 22, displaying the “functional sculptural pieces” of their regular stars. Standouts include Atelier Van Lieshout’s Infrastructure dining table of forged steel and glass, Sebastian Brajkovic’s asymmetric bronze and silk-embroidered Lathe V chair and Studio Job’s contemporary take on a stained glass window in polychrome handblown glass, lead and Indian rosewood. “Once, every artist wanted to be in Paris,” Lombrail explains. “Then they disappeared. Now we feel Paris is coming back on the map. There is new, real excitement for contemporary art.”

54 rue de la Verrerie, 4th, 01.42.78.80.92. website

Originally published in the September 2011 issue of France Today