The Musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design in Bordeaux organises an exhibition about the links between colour and design. In the hôtel de Lalande, colour is everywhere, from the green and gold wood paneling of the Salon de Gascq to the yellow woodwork of the Chambre jonquille. It is this highly colourful identity that has given rise to the exhibition’s theme.
Oh Couleurs!
Designed by Pierre Charpin, the exhibition “Oh Couleurs!” explores the links between colour and design, our perception of objects and the way we interact with them.
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- 01 August 2017
- Bordeaux
While historians of design have shown a preference for questions associated with form, manufacture, materials and new technologies, few of them have been dealing with colour. Yet colour has a direct influence on our perception of objects and the way we interact with them. Colour is also part and parcel of the definition of periods and styles. All so many aspects which visitors will have a chance to discover here through examples taken from the history of objects and design: Tupperware colours; the place of colour in the work of the designer Verner Panton; and the little known role of the decorator Paule Marrot for the Renault automobile company.
The exhibition features also objects with a history either forgotten or unknown by the Western public, like these Japanese boro, popular clothing made of assembled pieces of fabrics, then traditionally dyed with indigo. Because the museum is close to Le Corbusier’s Cité Frugès at Pessac, recently listed as a World Heritage by Unesco, the exhibition will make an architectural foray to show the role played by architectural polychromy in Le Corbusier’s work, tested for the first time during the construction of this workers’ housing estate, in the town of Pessac, just to the southwest of Bordeaux (1924–1926).
Designed by Pierre Charpin, the exhibition will be held in an outstanding venue, the former municipal prison on “Rue Boulan”, located behind the museum and built in the 19th century by the City of Bordeaux for the police departments then occupying the hôtel de Lalande. Turned into a storage area for the museum’s reserves in the 1980s, it was then emptied of all those works in order to open its doors to the public in September 2016. “Oh couleurs!” is the first exhibition to be presented in this atypical place.
until 5 November 2017
Oh Couleurs! Design through the lens of colour
Musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design in Bordeaux
rue Bouffard 39, Bordeaux