Francois Dallegret: Le Monde à l’Envers / The World Upside-Down

Curated by Francois Perrin | First exhibition of Francois Dallegret’s work in Los Angeles

“Atomizeur,” Montreal, 1977.
“Atomizeur,” Montreal, 1977. © Courtesy of WUHO

The enigmatic French architect François Dallegret’s imaginative, futuristic and unconventional ideas have propelled designs for everything from bars of soap to cars, nightclubs and light installations over the last 60 years. A new exhibition at Los Angeles’s WUHO gallery, “Francois Dallegret: The World Upside-Down,” will be his first solo show in that city, and focuses primarily on his work from the 1950s through the 1980s. Still active in Montreal, Dallegret’s diverse output is sometimes critical, often funny and always visionary, straddling the line between design and art. Like his utopian contemporaries Yves Klein and Superstudio, Dallegret prodigiously imagined possibilities for a better, more evolved way of life. The show’s curator, the architect Francois Perrin, describes Dallegret’s vision for the future as advanced for its time, and notes that even in a pre-Internet, pre-smartphone age, the designer sought to determine how technology could improve our daily lives.