Matali Crasset

Product/Industrial Designer / France / Matali Crasset

www.matalicrasset.com

Matali Crasset, trained as an industrial designer, is a graduate of the ENSCI—Ateliers (École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle workshops). In 1998, after working with Denis Santachiara in Italy and Philippe Starck in France, she established her own studio, Matali Crasset Productions, in a renovated former printing firm in the heart of Belleville in Paris.

Crasset’s imaginative work—which seeks to engage the community of end users by exploring design’s role in everyday life—encompasses product design, interiors, architecture, and art installations. Her clients include Artemide, Cristal Saint Louis, Danese, Domestic, Domodinamica, Dornbracht, Dune, Exquisite Design, Hermès, Le Printemps, Lexon, L'Oréal, Orangina, Swarosvki, Thomson Multimedia, Okaidi, the Stedelijk Museum’s-Hertogenbosch (SM’s) in the Netherlands, and hotels in Nice and Tunisia.

Crasset considers design as research, which allows her to address current routines of daily living as well as sketch out future scenarios. With both a view of the world that is at once knowledgeable and curious, she questions the obviousness of symbols and codes so as to facilitate a breaking of these bonds—beginning with her mobile “hospitality column” for Domeau & Pérès in 2000, “Quand Jim monte à Paris” (When Jim goes up to Paris). Her proposals are never geared toward a simple improvement of what already exists but toward developing typologies structured around principles such as modularity or interlacing networks. Her work revolves around searching for new coordination processes and formulating new logics for living. Always in search of new territories to explore, she collaborates with eclectic worlds—from crafts to electronic music, from the textile industry to fair trade—realizing projects in set design, furniture, architecture, graphic design. She has also collaborated with artists, including Peter Halley, as well as with local and municipal government agencies.

Crasset was named International Interior Designer of the Year at the British Interior Design Awards in 2004, received the Grand Prize for Design from the city of Paris in 1997, and was a previous recipient of the Premier Prix de Concours Louis Vuitton. Her work has been shown in museums across the world, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the National Art Museum of China in Beijing; MUDAC in Lausanne, Switzerland; the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; and Le Grand Hornu in Belgium. A solo exhibition of Crasset’s work, “Le voyage en uchronie,” was on view at the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac at Paris Pantin in June and July 2013

A monograph of Matali Crasset’s designs was published in 2012 by Rizzoli International Publications.

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