Benjamin Graindorge

Benjamin Graindorge is recognized as one of France’s most important emerging designers. He graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle – Les Ateliers in Paris, after a period working in the Boroullec Brothers’ office, before taking up a residency at the villa in Kyoto Kujoyama. His approach is a subtle fusion of technological abstraction, poetry and simplicity. Ranging from industrial design to decorative objects some of his objects, as he says, “carry the essence of light with grace and elegance,” while others offer “a moment of perfect truth”. Graindorge is already recognised in the design world for his remarkable technical ability to make  delicate, curvy and apparently lightweight objects. Designs often follow function, with an organic mimesis coming into play to create forms that display, support or protect small plants and delicate flowers. In these works, Graindorge connects Japanese traditions with futuristic solutions to generate a new hybrid design. Even Graindorge’s technology is expressed organically, through cavities, streamlining and  reference to the elements, so that comfort and emotional impact go hand in hand. For him, a sofa is not only a seat, but a flexible seating ‘landscape’, with its variable geometry made of intersections, dips and densities. Benjamin has been selected for the Design Parade festival and has won the Cinna Award and the Audi Talents Awards for design. He collaborated with François Bauchet on the scenography for the Biennale Internationale du Design de Saint-Etienne 2010. In 2011 he had his first solo exhibition at the prestigious YMER & MALTA Gallery.