“Life without art
is a spring without water.”
Gold and red, brown and black were the colours of that time: in her twenties, Eileen Gray created Japanese-
infuenced lacquer works and set up an exhibition featuring a lascivious boudoir. Infuenced by the art deco
style and made of fne woods, her furniture inspired the Parisian avant-garde circles of the Rive Gauche.
In these buzzing ‘lef bank’ circles, Eileen Gray not only found great loves, freedom and inspiration, but also
her frst clients, who particularly loved her modern carpets. From 1909 to 1930, Eileen Gray and a friend ran
various small weaving workshops in which her abstract carpet designs were produced. Small-format pictures,
which she painted on paper using matte opaque watercolours, served as weaving templates. In addition to
such gouaches, Eileen Gray also created collages. With this technique, individual geometric elements, such
as squares or circles, could be repositioned to explore design variations. Each design was a special challenge
because, unlike a painting, a carpet has no clearly defned top or bottom, right and lef. It has to look good
from all sides.
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