Jacques Jarrige

These explorations in jewelry quickly informed new larger works as Jarrige began working less in the realm of design objects and furniture, and more in pure abstraction, which has quickly become the driving force of his practice. Between 2016 and 2018, large scale sculptures were installed in the French Consulate in New York, at the Queens Museum in two exhibitions curated by Vida Sabbaghi, in a municipal community center outside of Paris, in various private residences, and experimental art spaces such as the old Pfizer building in Brooklyn. With Valerie Goodman Gallery, he has also had four solo exhibitions.

Concurrently, Jarrige started to experiment with making small jewelry as a way to stay busy while away from his studio. This work had a new formal aspect but spoke the same design language as his other work, just on a more intimate scale. He began to work directly within the limitations of the human body as a physical space, developing new forms to unify its lines and movements. The resulting bands and pendants are most often hammered metal pieces, evoking the sepals, petals, and stamen of flowers, pushing at and focusing attention toward the wearer. This work was first shown at MAD (Museum of Arts and Design) as part of The Loot Show, 2015.

In the 80's, Jacques Jarrige studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts but abandoned those studies in favor of making functional sculpted objects and avant-garde furniture. Influenced by artists such as Henry Moore and Alexander Calder and the furniture of George Nakashima and Alexandre Noll, he began working with humble and raw materials — a practice he became known for — patiently shaping, molding, and altering them with simple hand tools.

Since 2010, after gaining representation with Valerie Goodman Gallery in New York, he has been regularly showing in the United States. This period, brought new approaches and his objects have become increasingly unconfined and dynamic — some furniture gives the impression of loose drawings in space — while his wood, aluminum and brass sculptures have grown in scale, while still retaining the quality of his particular creative process.

In 1991, Jarrige was invited to join Frederic de Luca’s influential avant-garde gallery En Attendant les Barbares. There, he was urged to push his work farther outside of traditional forms and experiment with his tactile approach. His work from this period was primarily sculptural furniture and design objects – exemplifying the combination of his direct and meticulous processes with a growing vernacular of organic and flowing shapes – and garnered him recognition in Europe throughout the 1990s.

Jacques Jarrige is a French sculptor and designer, born December 1962 in Paris, France to a family of art collectors and scientists. His work is known for its fluid organic forms which are hand wrought from simple materials.