Maria Jeglinska’s Arrêt sur image

Maria Jeglinska, the polymath behind the Warsaw-based Office for Design & Research, gave the Design Parade 12 a tour in three walls. For the Arrêt sur image exhibition, the French-Polish designer put together a collection of retrospective works. “Each [wall] represents a practice from the office: design, research and drawings as if they were stills, a pause in an emerging sequence,” she said.

Jeglinska has been involved in industrial design projects —such as her work for Ligne Roset and the Hotel Essentials line for Warsaw’s Autor Rooms—, space design, filmmaking and writing. These experiences came together in the survey of works at Villa Noailles. “The curves of the chair Little Black relate the effervescence of Polish cafe terraces from the end of the 1960s, a fragment of the past from her native country, where she now lives and works,” explains writer Juliette Pollet. “The curves of the welcoming copper mirrors from the Hotel Essentials collection react to those of the Goodies Stools. The coffee service The Nightingale shares the fable which inspired its title and which one might think was written for these designers as a reason for meditating: a Chinese emperor who preferred the song of a mechanical nightingale to that of a real bird. All of these projects express her taste for drawings, which darken the pages of research notebooks, and cover the pages of magazines and the turned wood vases.”

While one wall features a series of drawings, objects are showcased on a large chrome green wall at various stages of production —including prototypes and research books. A short film explains further the research-based work, along with a series of images by designer and photographer Katrin Greiling.

Greiling’s images, along with a short fiction piece written by Oli Stratford, were collected and compiled into Space Time, a publication designed by Olivier Lebrun and released by Villa Noailles.