Best Things: Mathieu Matégot

One of the stands I loved at Maison et Objet was that of Danish outfit, Gubi, who say the following about themselves: “GUBI is a global design house searching the world to find forgotten icons from the past and icons of the future.”

One of their forgotten icons is Hungarian midcentury designer Mathieu Matégot, into whose oeuvre GUBI has dipped in order to reissue some of his classics.

Mathieu Matégot (1910-2001) was a Hungarian designer and architect who settled in France after 1944, where he started producing handmade furniture in Paris. He was the first person to combine metal tubing with perforated sheet metal – ritigulle was a technique he patented and one that particularly characterizes his work. In the 1950s, he created a wide range of distinctive designs that today is held up alongside contemporaries like Serge Mouille, Jean Prouve and Charlotte Perriand, and are still considered iconic and contemporary.

Matégot set up workshops in Paris and in Casablanca, manufacturing in limited numbers for up to 200 items. The Gubi reissues include some of his most iconic, like the Nagasaki chair (above) and the beautiful Satellite pendant, but if you do a Google Image search, you’ll find heaps of other Matégot designs with dealers and collectors.

The Matégot furniture production lasted only a few years, and in 1959 he abruptly ended his production and began his work on large-scale tapestries, like the one below, which he would continue for the rest of his career.

Visit the Gubi site, and trawl online dealers for more.