For Paris Design Week, Georges Mohasseb from Studio Manda reveals his new Tapir and Rhino collections, in an original selection of sculptural furniture. These pieces, with their organic lines, showcase great craftsmanship through a soft, elegant aesthetic language, inspired by the characteristic silhouettes of the eponymous animals.
Each creation is meticulously handcrafted in the studio's Beirut workshops, in a dialogue between excellent craftsmanship and contemporary design. The pieces of the Tapir collection are crafted in shaped wenge, with a subtle gradation of color that reveals all the nobility of this wood. The seats, upholstered in DEDAR fabrics, add a tactile and chromatic dimension of rare sophistication. In this way, the artist presents a veritable ode to materials, soft shapes and comfort rethought as a sensory and aesthetic experience.
The Rhino collection pays tribute to the quiet power and iconic silhouette of the rhinoceros in two sideboards with a singular presence. Their monolithic structures with fragmented volumes play on curves and hollows to catch the light. The skin, made of honeycombed oxidized concrete - a material designed in close collaboration with Matterlab in Lebanon - lends a unique character to the pieces' texture. More than just furniture, they are functional sculptures with a very original look.
This solo show celebrates Georges Mohasseb and his team at Studio Manda. Emblematic artist of the Galerie Gosserez, he unveils here manifest collections where art and design meet with precision, in a lyrical scenography orchestrated by Johanna Colombatti, in perfect symbiosis with the sumptuous DEDAR fabrics.
The scenography was conceived by Johanna Colombatti as a domestic environment, that of the apartment of a collector, a discerning aesthete and an avid traveler whose explorations left him with a taste for the exotic. Here, the furniture is zoomorphic, borrowing its lines from tapir and rhinoceros alike, curiosities and animal art populate the set, while abstract paintings adorn the walls like evanescent landscapes, evoking distant lands visited in the past. The comfortable carpets create a warm atmosphere, while the vegetation invites the visitor to a possible elsewhere.
Welcome in the "Whispers of the Forest" …