Good design is not only functional but part of a story and, as every project is a unique opening or perspective, a new opportunity in the world, Frédéric Sofia has swung between design and art since setting up his first self-publishing company, Wombat, in 1994. Born in Lyon in 1967, a mechanical engineering graduate with a degree in marketing, he is now a Paris-based designer who approaches his discipline through close contacts in industry and the wider economy, guided by his insatiable desire to feel useful rather than a need to be vaunted. From industrial products to works of art produced in collaboration with Catherine Sofia, this playful yet rational Jack-of-all-trades roams intuitively between the worlds of design and contemporary art. From simple graphics to complex narrative pieces, structural realism to formal aesthetics, from the Luxembourg chair designed for Fermob to the Domestic series exhibited in galleries, his not-so-naïve look at modern society is materialized through creations that are sometimes provocative without being polemic. From critical success to commercial success, the trans-disciplinary reflection and approach of Frédéric Sofia has been consolidated since becoming an independent designer in 2000. Through an array of perceptive and practical projects, all of them informed by constant and detailed research, his aim is always to improve daily life and to consider the multiplicity of uses within an object, all the while bringing feeling, magic and emotion to the table. Working at the crossroads of disciplines, he questions, reinvents and diverts, never neglecting to combine the techniques of the designer with the reflection and methods of the artist.
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