ARTWORK De Stijl. Gouache on paper, c. 1922–24
RUG Wendingen Rug, designed c. 1920–35
Tis much-acclaimed major commission encouraged the then 44-year-old designer to open her own
gallery in 1921 with the masculine-sounding name ‘Jean Désert’. A name that conveyed competence at a time
when a female designer, a self-taught one at that, was an exotic exception. Eileen Gray subverted social preju-
dices in both her professional and private life by boldly playing with identities. White and black, silver and grey
also defned the interiors of the new showroom; instead of lustrous wood, bare steel tubing shone on furniture
and fxtures. Te ambiguous Désert et Gray adorned the gallery’s letterhead: performing gender, the fuid
staging of gender and identity, remained a motif at the core of her life. Te Bibendum club chair, which she
designed in 1926, also plays with this notion. She knocked the heavy feet of this insignia of the cigar-smoking,
car-driving old-boy networkers and replaced them with an airy base of tubular steel – the cheeky statement of
a woman who preferred wearing trouser suits, loved women as well as men and drove a car herself.
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