Bronze work by Anasthasia Millot

Anasthasia Millot originally studied fashion design in Paris, and her work with fabric has left a lasting — if indirect — influence on her objects: after years of painstaking experiments, Millot has learned to translate into bronze the fluidity of preferred textiles like jersey, creating subtly dynamic shapes that seem to defy the statics of solid materials. Her signature element is a very particular elan: a slight twist of the slender metal legs that carry her tables, chairs and stools with such antelope grace. This quarter-turn gives an impression of movement and seduces the light to glide along and around the highly polished bronze surfaces Anasthasia Millot creates in the foundry of her husband, Didier Redoutey.
While Millot deeply admires the early Modernist Jean Michel Frank, whose deceptive simplicity and understated use of precious materials she strives to emulate, she also borrows from the illusionist tool kit of the Baroque: the front legs of her armchairs and stools, for example, are ever so slightly taller than the back legs, further stressing a sense of tension, as if a high-strung animal were ready to spring. At the same time, the shiny surfaces of her sharp lines give bronze an atypically icy look, even its weight seems greatly reduced.
The eye is happily fooled by their light-footedness, knowing all the while the truth of their solidity – and relishing the contradiction.
The fewer elements one works with, as Millot has learned from fashion, the more difficult the design, and the easier it looks, and the more deeply one needs to understand it. The fifteen pieces this thoughtful artist debuts at Valerie Goodman Gallery all embody her victory of line over mass and presence over volume. We look forward to introducing their edgy, animated, and substantial personalities.