We are pleased to present Bay Area sculptor Ruth Charlotte Kneass’s amazing wooden mobiles in dialogue with the architecturally beautiful and unrestored furniture of Pierre Jeanneret from the capital city of Chandigarh. The Jeanneret furniture is a single-owner collection from a collector who specializes in the furniture and designs of Jeanneret and Le Corbusier. These are the pieces he has held back over the last 12 years, and he is displaying them here for sale for the very first time.

Here is an excerpt from Objet Chandigarh, our forthcoming book documenting this personal collection:

“The poetic dialect of patina upon these objects reveals itself with fluency. These are furnishings that celebrate lived history with proud authority, as battered yet elegant warriors. Through their weary surfaces — with sun-bleached, split upholstery and improvised alterations — they announce an honest primitivism, honed by the souls of generations of users, traveling ever further from their modernist nativity. Their emotive murmurs are essential, inimitable, and valuable. They are imperfect, but all the more beautiful for their jolie-laide honesty. These are objects that are repaired, but not yet restored. As if companion travelers to Orpheus, they belong neither to one world nor another, fossilized, suspended within a memory of Utopia and not yet enhanced to embrace the likely next.” -Simon Andrews (London)

While the design and art worlds are very aware of Pierre Jeanneret's work, one usually sees the pieces after they have been refinished, reupholstered, and heavily restored. We are presenting the pieces in the "raw," just as they were found in India, with the original finishes, modifications, and adaptations by their former users. We feel that Ruth's works are the perfect complement to these rarely seen relics from Le Corbusier's masterwork.