Patrick Kim-Gustafson Stockholm, b. 1986

Born of a Korean mother and Swedish father, Patrick Kim-Gustafson is a Swedish designer and artist based in Paris.

After several years working with Philippe Starck, 2020 marked a turning point in Patrick's career. Taking advantage of the time out imposed by the pandemic, he set up his studio in Loupchat, a small village in the Lot region of south-west France, the region of his wife’s family. Patrick made his first creations there, inspired by the lines of the wood from the oak trees in the nearby forest. He inaugurated his artist's studio under the name Ateljé Loupchat. It is this direct link from tree to object, this evolution from natural work of art to raw, then worked sculpture, that is the essence of Patrick's work.

Leaving behind his tedious work as a designer, most of which was done on computer, Patrick felt the need to confront the material directly and to give life freely to his own creations, going beyond the implicit rules of the design world. Initially purely intellectual concepts, Patrick decided to materialise the forms of his imagination, to manifest their existence in the physical world by giving them weight and tactility.

Patrick's memory, forged over the years by constant exposure to the curves of designer furniture, is his main source of inspiration. He draws on mental images from the four corners of the world and from all eras, often already intertwined, and whose precise origin he cannot identify. First conceptualised mentally, Patrick then transposes these silhouettes onto paper before converting the resulting sketches into miniatures.

His artistic exploration of wood focuses primarily on contrasting volumes and materials, playing subtly with their density. These include 200-kilo vases housing a soliflor, massive benches with a single, slender seat, and organic, openwork lamps perched on monumental pedestals. Materialising the contrast between Beauty and the Beast, Patrick Kim-Gustafson pokes fun at the absurdity of his creations, using his implacable mastery of materials to play with weightlessness.

Unlike the work of a visual artist, which often involves adding material, Patrick works by subtraction: the object, a free form, emerges beneath his cut-out. Although not inclined to chance, the knots in the wood and the material constraints impose their own rules, shaping the artist's final compositions. The result is hybrid sculptures that are both delicate and daring, devoid of any obvious practical function or creatively hijacked, questioning the boundaries between practicality, aestheticism and the exuberance of the object and the work of art.