BEYOND ALL LIMITS
Since Pierre Bergé launched the auction house of the same name just six years ago in Paris, things have moved at lightning speed. The ambitions of this nearly eighty year-old entrepreneur are boundless: be it art or fashion, borders are only there to be crossed. The auction house has opened in Brussels in June 2006, immediately turning Pierre Bergé & associés into the biggest player in Belgium. “Belgians are to design and ethnic art what the Italians are to fashion,” said vice-president Frédéric Chambre, when he described Brussels as the ideal operations base for becoming an international market leader in these fields. The impressive and historically valuable premises in the heart of the most prestigious art district in Brussels, the Sablon, has developed into much more than just an auction house, being ‘a multicultural centre’. A new challenge for 2008: Part of the ground floor has been turned into a white box and 200m2 gallery that will be exclusively devoted to monographic and thematic exhibitions on contemporary and American vintage design.

In view of all this, it’s hard to imagine a more suitable artist and designer to open the Galerie Pierre Bergé & associés. In a soundscape specially created for the event, Quinze presents some 30 new pieces – one-offs and limited editions, signed and numbered – partly referring back to the Mutagenesis exhibition he built a few months ago in Verona, but also including work exclusively created for this one-man-show: Stilt Houses, Walking Light Houses, “Love gun” paintings, porcelain vases, and a set of table and chairs in polyurethane. In the months to come, the Galerie Pierre Bergé & associés will also mount one-man-shows of leading design figures such as Edward Wormley and Jurgen Bey, thus offering Brussels the international platform it deserves as a design capital. The capability has always been there; it was just a question of ambition.