François Corbeau

Having begun his artistic career in 1983, French artist François Corbeau is self taught as a sculptor. He is known for his shining metal furniture works wrought from sheets of aluminum, bronze, and tin, which embody a contemporary practice of dinanderie metalwork traditions that date back to medieval Europe. Light becomes an active component of Corbeau’s works, with their gleaming finish evoking a brilliant luminosity and reflecting their surroundings in space. With their large surface areas of shaped metal polished to a high shine acting as mirrors, Corbeau envisions the creation of his pieces as “quantum events,” capable of producing a transformed image of their environment. The reflection of the interiors in which they are placed is cast upon their surfaces, along with the beings that share space with them, giving these furnishings the power of “instant energy exchange,” as the artist describes it. The sculptural inventiveness of his work calls to mind the mirrored works of Anish Kapoor: incongruous, metaphysical objects that excite our visual and spatial awareness. Corbeau’s exquisite solid metal handling graces credenzas, cabinets, semainiers, nightstands, bars, vases, and boxes: objects of irresistible opulence and density that project gossamer filaments of light. In the first two years of his career he won the Prize of the National Commission for UNESCO (1984) and the Florence Gould Award for Sculpture in Monaco (1985) in collaboration with Cardenas. He previously worked with Pierre Staudenmeyer of the legendary contemporary furniture gallery Neotu that operated in Paris between 1984 and 2000 prior to being represented by Twenty First Gallery.