Contrepoint — musée Bourdelle, 2026

Contrepoint
8 – 27 September 2026
Paris Design Week
musée Bourdelle,
18 rue Antoine-Bourdelle, 75015 Paris

With Contrepoint, Anthony Guerrée brings sculpture and design into dialogue in the manner of a musical counterpoint.

Within the Musée Bourdelle, the sculptures already compose a silent score, made of presences, voids and tensions. Anthony Guerrée inscribes new forms – in wood, glass, textile and clay – that converse with this existing world without ever imposing upon it.

Contrepoint offers an immersion into the creative process of a contemporary designer. The installation explores the possible correspondences between sculpture and design, setting the various material and formal investigations carried out by Anthony Guerrée against Bourdelle’s plastic universe. His creations establish a subtle dialogue with the sculptor’s forms, rhythms and relationship to matter.

Contrepoint proposes a reading of design as a sculptural practice. Here, objects appear in different states: fragments, matrices, prototypes, finished pieces. Visitors are thus invited to step into a space of inquiry, where materials, forms and gestures speak with the spirit of the place.

FILTERED SHAPES
In the plaster casts hall

In this emblematic space of the museum, a set of stained-glass works conceived specially for the exhibition introduces light as a new working material.

The compositions arise from a body of lines developed by observing the curves and tensions present in Bourdelle’s sculptures. These fragments of line, abstract yet deeply tied to sculptural movement, become coloured compositions.

Stained glass becomes an architecture of light, transforming the space through an interplay of forms and shadows, thanks to the craftsmanship of Sophie Toporkoff, the glass from Verrerie de Saint-Just, and the solid ash structures crafted by cabinetmaker Louis Monier.

BLENDED SHAPES
In the sculpture studio and the garden

At the heart of the Sculpture studio, Anthony Guerrée develops a body of research around mixed clay, carried out in collaboration with the Italian manufacture Fornace Brioni.

This research unfolds through terracotta surfaces and modules, three-dimensional objects — vases, catch-alls, free forms — as well as fragments and variations of material.

The designer gives a central place to moulds and matrices. Displayed on the same footing as the finished pieces, they appear as sculptures in negative, revealing the memory of the gesture and the invisible stages of making.

Through this installation, Anthony Guerrée sheds light on the process by which matter is transformed, from imprint to object. The installation extends all the way into the museum’s inner garden.

WOVEN SHAPES
In the painting studio

In this intimate space, Anthony Guerrée sets sculptural forms in dialogue with everyday objects.

The Orbe daybed, designed for the French publisher La Chance, is shown in a version specially upholstered for the installation. The fabric is a jacquard whose motif derives directly from the curves of Bourdelle’s sculptures, woven by the centuries-old Tissages de Charlieu mill with the technical support of Isabelle Arnadie.

Around this piece, several occasional pieces of furniture accompany the setting, including a previously unseen revolving bookcase. On its shelves are arranged moulds from various projects, standing as so many autonomous sculptural presences