Pauline Deltour: An Apparent Simplicity, the inaugural retrospective at the renovated MADD Bordeaux, 22 April – 21 September 2026, with scenography by Caroline Perret and Konstantin Grcic

Pauline Deltour at MADD Bordeaux

Pauline Deltour, who died at 38 on 5 September 2021 after ten years running a Paris studio that produced roughly 180 industrial-design objects, has finally been given the survey her catalogue deserved: the Pauline Deltour MADD Bordeaux retrospective is the first show to hold all of those objects in a single room. “Pauline Deltour, une apparente simplicité / An Apparent Simplicity” began on Wednesday 22 April 2026 with a 7 p.m. reception at 39 rue Bouffard and runs until 21 September 2026, the inaugural show of the partially reopened museum. It is co-curated by Bérengère Bussioz, Konstantin Grcic, Caroline Perret and Étienne Tornier, with exhibition design by Perret (CPWH) and Grcic assisted by Claire Pondard. The Pauline Deltour MADD Bordeaux survey is the first time her commissions for Alessi, Muji, Lexon, La Chance, Hem, Tolix, Discipline, Forge de Laguiole, Established & Sons, Cire Trudon, COR, JEM and Puiforcat have been gathered in one place, and the show is unusually graph-shaped: the curatorial premise is that an industrial designer’s life work is best read as a network of brands, artisans and dates rather than as a chronology of forms. ...

May 17, 2026 · 15 min · 3131 words · FORMA Editorial
Konstantin Grcic's exhibition-design practice from Panorama at Vitra Design Museum 2014 to Pauline Deltour: An Apparent Simplicity at MADD Bordeaux 2026

Konstantin Grcic Exhibition Design, 2009–2026

Konstantin Grcic’s scenography for “Pauline Deltour: An Apparent Simplicity”, the roughly 180-object survey of his former assistant that opened at MADD Bordeaux on 22 April 2026, is the seventh major exhibition the Munich-born industrial designer has co-curated or staged since 2009, and the first in which his role is to memorialise rather than to introduce. Co-curated with Bérengère Bussioz, Caroline Perret and Etienne Tornier, the show is one of the inaugural exhibitions of the partial reopening of the Musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design at 39 rue Bouffard in Bordeaux, and the clearest demonstration to date that Konstantin Grcic exhibition design is a second body of work running parallel to his industrial output for Magis, Vitra, Plank and Mattiazzi. ...

May 16, 2026 · 18 min · 3623 words · FORMA Editorial
Junya Ishigami pavilion at Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein, with Konstantin Grcic Scout tubular-steel workplace system in the foreground

Vitra Campus 2026: Ishigami Pavilion vs Grcic Scout

Vitra in 2026 placed two answers to the same brand question on opposite ends of the Vitra Campus 2026 brief: Junya Ishigami’s 280-square-metre transparent pavilion held up by 47 needle-thin steel columns of 16–31 millimetre diameter, and Konstantin Grcic’s Scout, a five-piece modular workplace family launched on 19–20 March 2026 from a tubular-steel kit assembled by hand. One is architecture-as-statement, sited in Weil am Rhein and engineered with Jun Sato Structural Engineers; the other is product-as-statement, a workspace system shipped in flat-pack pieces and tightened with mechanical tilts and no firmware. Read together, they describe how Vitra now wants to be understood — as a company that argues with both buildings and chairs, and that no longer treats one of those as the warm-up act for the other. ...

May 6, 2026 · 14 min · 2821 words · FORMA Editorial

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