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Designer: Nathalie Du Pasquier
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  • About
  • Items (27)
  • Auctions (16)

Nathalie Du Pasquier
b. 1957

Nathalie Du Pasquier is one of the most defining pattern designers of the 20th century. With a playful and postmodern approach to form and color, Du Pasquier creates furniture and objects shaped by the personality of her lively patterns.

After modernism’s abandonment of decoration, we wanted to make the decorated surface the protagonist again, and not just something added on top. For Memphis, the ‘decorated surface’ was something quite different to the ‘decorated object.'

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Four Things to Know about Nathalie Du Pasquier

She is completely self-taught, never attending school for art or design.

Seeing Byzantine mosaics as a young girl influenced her interest in how surface pattern related to architecture and form.

Though she is most known for her textile designs, furniture, ceramics, carpets and clocks, Du Pasquier's main creative focus for the last several decades has been large abstract paintings.

The song used in the advertisement for her collaboration with American Apparel was written and performed by Du Pasquier in 1981.

Auction Results Nathalie Du Pasquier

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Composition #24 (diptych)

estimate: $7,000–9,000

result: $11,970

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Royal daybed

estimate: $4,000–5,000

result: $8,125

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Royal daybed

estimate: $4,000–6,000

result: $4,410

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Carrot vase

estimate: $500–700

result: $4,375

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Drimmer table lamp

estimate: $1,000–1,500

result: $2,794

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Gracieux Accueil lidded box

estimate: $2,000–3,000

result: $2,375

Nathalie Du Pasquier

tapestry

estimate: $3,000–5,000

result: $1,800

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Doulce Response clock from Objects for the Electronic Age

estimate: $1,500–2,000

result: $1,500

I am also interested in understanding that link between geometry and representation of space – the ambiguity of how three dimensions render on a flat plane….Adventures are like that: you follow tracks, you don’t follow ideologies.

Nathalie Du Pasquier

Nathalie Du Pasquier b. 1957

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As one of the founding members of Memphis, Nathalie Du Pasquier has created some of the most recognizable motifs of postmodern design. Born in Bordeaux, France in 1957, Du Pasquier quotes her mother, an art historian and her father, a virologist, as early inspirations in her appreciation towards art and the natural world. With a curiosity to see the world piqued by living in an active port town, at eighteen-years-old she set out for Gabon and West Africa, spending two years traveling and absorbing the cultures that would later inspire her design sensibilities and interest in bright, bold surface pattern.

In 1979 she moved to Milan to work as an au pair. She was drawn to the city for its modern attitude and because it wasn’t “overwhelmed by the beauty of the past.” There, she met her partner George Sowden, a British designer who encouraged her to become interested in modern design. Despite having no formal education, she began working for the fashion brands Fiorucci and Naj Oleari creating textile patterns. In 1981, Ettore Sottsass invited her and Sowden to join the newly formed Memphis group. Du Pasquier says that she was especially drawn to Sottsass’s anarchic, anti-academic style and non-hierarchical approach to taste. Her main contributions to the iconic design style were textiles and furniture, though she also created clothing, plastic laminates, ceramics and objects. Typical of Du Pasquier’s elevated but playful style is her investigation between space and form and exploration of the realm of the imagination.

In 1987, Du Pasquier left the Memphis group and devoted herself to painting and reconnecting with the classics of art history; in recent years she was returned to designing items such as clothing, jewelry and carpets. She did a well-received collaboration with American Apparel in 2014 and in 2015 she had a solo exhibition at Exile in Berlin and a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania in 2017, Big Objects Not Always Silent. She continues to live and work in Milan.

Additional Resources

Nathalie Du Pasquier
The Strange Order of Things
Nathalie Du Pasquier for American Apparel
Nathalie Du Pasquier in Her Studio
Big Objects Not Always Silent

I think I am inspired by whatever happens to me. Not having studied anything, I could feel that I could in fact do whatever I wanted.

Nathalie Du Pasquier

To learn more about a work by Nathalie Du Pasquier in your collection, contact our specialists.

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