Contrepoint, Anthony Guerrée at Museum Bourdelle – Photos by Francis Amiand.

Design, Art. “Sculpture, in the end, is nothing other than drawing in every sense,” Art Deco master Antoine Bourdelle once said. From there, designer Anthony Guerrée has taken that idea and run with it, pulling the great Parisian sculptor’s lines, curves, tensions and counter-forms into furniture and objects made from wood, glass, textile and mixed clay. The result is Contrepoint, an installation at the Musée Bourdelle and Guerrée’s first outing with Paris Design Week.

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Through Contrepoint, the French designer offers a contemporary take on Bourdelle’s legacy, building “a silent score, made of presences, voids and tensions,” as he told Archipanic. Across four rooms, his pieces “resonate with the museum collections like a musical counterpoint.”

Heritage here becomes raw material. Guerrée’s new vocabulary of forms starts with silhouette and composition: in the grand Plaster Casts hall, four stained-glass and wood screens cast coloured light around Bourdelle’s Dying Centaur, Herakles the Archer and the Monument to General Alvear.

These compositions grew from a set of lines traced from the curves and tensions found in the sculptures themselves — abstract fragments, still bound to sculptural movement, reworked into colour.

In the museum’s Sculpture studio, refined pieces in mixed clay sit alongside terracotta surfaces, modules, moulds and matrices, all arranged on Bourdelle’s own worktable, with the display spilling into the inner garden.

As part of Contrepoint, the Painting studio, a cosier space, holds the Orbe daybed, upholstered in a jacquard designed specially for the show and drawing on Bourdelle’s shapes, alongside smaller furniture pieces including a revolving bookcase.

Contrepoint ultimately reads design as a sculptural act. Objects appear here in every stage — fragment, matrix, prototype, finished piece — inviting visitors into a space of inquiry where material, form and gesture speak the language of the place itself.

All photos are by Francis Amiand – Courtesy of the designer.