PAD LONDON / 13-18.10.26

Carlo Bugatti, Jean-Michel Frank, Franz Kline, Joseph Urban, Jean Dunand, Marc Du Plantier, Josef Hoffmann, Yonel Lebovici.

For a gallery, collecting is never a static act. It is a quiet and continuous pursuit, part intuition, part patience, part archaeology. A search for those rare objects that have endured time while retaining something of the moment in which they were conceived. Over the years, this pursuit has come to define Sceners Gallery. Beyond rarity or authorship, we are drawn to artefacts that carry within them a particular intensity: traces of an artist’s thought, of an interior, a patron, an exhibition, or simply of the hands through which they have passed. To find them is often the result of years of looking; to bring them into the light again is a privilege.

This catalogue gathers such encounters.

At its heart, an exceptional selection of works by Carlo Bugatti, conceived around 1902, at the height of the most singular period of his career. Parchment, darkened wood and copper become an almost imaginary architecture, a language suspended within his ingenious radical singularity. Several of these works now resurface from a long-held European collection, having remained away from public view for generations, while others find echoes in the archival record of Bugatti’s celebrated ‘Le arti decorative internazionali del nuovo secolo’, Turin catalog. Around them, other distinct voices unfold. The deep tortoiseshell alchemies of Jean Dunand’s lacquer respond to the raw, monochromatic velocity of Franz Kline; nearby, the linear rigor of Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Urban serves as a counterbalance of architectural discipline. Though separated by medium, geography, and time, each work shares the same core conviction: that an object may transcend its utility to become an expression of thought. This selection of works that follow is exceedingly rare testimony of survival through remarkable provenances, archival photographs and exhibition histories. Together, they form neither a chronology nor an inventory, but a constellation of objects separated by decades and geographies, brought together by the strength of their presence.

Perhaps this is what collecting ultimately means to us: not possession, but passage. To search, to discover, to preserve, and, for a brief moment, to become part of an object’s much longer history.

Jonathan Haddad, Co-Founder & Curator, Sceners Gallery.