NEW YORK — To commemorate a visit to an art museum, wouldn’t it be great of the gift shop offered something more personal than a postcard?
The thought had occurred to Pierre Pelegry, who founded Paris-based artist design shop Ligne Blanche in 2007. “There are more and more art lovers, but of course, many people cannot collect,” he recently told ARTINFO. “I wanted to develop something for museums that people can take home and live with, but of quality.”
Pelegry began his business with tins of chocolate designed in collaboration with the Keith Haring Foundation, which evolved into fine Limoges porcelain plates featuring the classic works of René Magritte, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, and others — the pieces have graced the gift shops of the Guggenheim, LACMA, and the Centre Georges Pompidou. His most recent launch in early February — 24 plates for his first-time collaboration with MoMA — marked a turning point for the company. Six of the plates were created in collaboration with four living artists: Alex Katz, Robert Longo, Jack Pierson, and Tom Sachs.
“To work with an institution or estate is great,” said Pelegry, but active collaboration is a different story. The creation of his latest collection required more than the transfer of a work of art to a piece of porcelain — it was an intimate process of capturing an artistic sensibility. “We do prototypes, they see the results, they change their minds.”
For Sachs’s “Top Mug,” Sachs and Pelegry developed a design that expressed Sachs’s associations with branding and bricolage. The result was a trompe l’oeil homage to the artist’s 2001 fast food parody “Nutsy McDonald’s”: a flat white plate that appears to have been collaged with the raised buttons, flaps, and “WARNING: HOT” inscriptions like those seen on disposable coffee cups. At Sachs’s insistence, it includes the minutest of details — even lines that look like the glue he would have used. Jack Pierson designed a plate collaged with various typefaces that spell the words “Golden Years,” along with a series of four scented candles created with French perfumer Givaudan. The olfactory art captures various specific moods: “Golden Years” is meant to evoke the brightness of old age in vanilla and honey with the spice of sage and black pepper.
While the plates and candles work fine as standalone décor either on a shelf or behind the glass of a china cabinet, Pelegry prefers to think of them as active agents of design. The colorful scent of a Haring candle brings a pop sensibility to a space; his array of plates are curatorial tools for dinner parties.
“For classic dinners, I like to use my George Baselitz plates,” he said. “If you have a younger crowd, you can use the Basquiat plates and play with the different colors, or for dessert, depending on who’s coming, I can use black-and-white Mapplethorpe plates and put red fruits on them. It brings an atmosphere to dinner.” And certainly, they’re better conversation starters than a postcard.
