Enter the Multifaceted World of Eileen Gray!

*Keep scrolling to learn more about tomorrow’s event, Eileen Gray: Issues in Research and Architecture

Eileen Gray’s earliest artistic training began at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she also began learning about lacquer. She continued to study both practices in Paris where she moved permanently in 1906. Gray became one of the first European designers to adapt traditional Asian lacquer techniques to contemporary Western taste. Eventually, she opened a highly successful lacquer and rug workshops.

Gray was an important contributor to French decorative arts during the first quarter of the twentieth century. By the mid-1920s, largely because of her connection with the Romanian architect Jean Badovici and the impact of progressive artistic practices, especially from the Netherlands, Gray’s design thinking underwent a radical change as she pursued a career as a modern designer and architect. The house called E 1027, completed in 1929 when Gray was fifty-one years old, was both her first major commission as an architect and a summation of her individual approach to modernism that would develop in a range of other projects that were largely unbuilt.

Explore the timeline of Eileen Gray’s life and work on view in the exhibition here.