Et déjà l'objet n'est plus là: 1979-2013 - Martine Bedin

Et déjà l'objet n'est plus là brings together 134 drawings by architect and designer Martine Bedin, tracing nearly five decades of creative research into the nature of the object and the act of drawing itself.

A founding member of the influential Memphis group in Milan in 1981, Bedin has devoted her career to questioning the relationship between design, imagination, and everyday life. Since leaving Bordeaux for Italy in 1977, she has filled countless sketchbooks with drawings of improbable objects, furniture, and houses—visions that became her own landscapes and still lifes. Through these sketches runs a single, persistent question: Can a new world be imagined by drawing another chair, another table, another lamp, another vase?

As the years passed, the question deepened. The certainty of the object gradually gave way to a more fragile and essential exploration, where drawing becomes lighter, watercolours more transparent, and the blank page increasingly significant. Rather than defining objects, the drawings begin to dissolve them, acknowledging both the limits of design and the enduring power of imagination.

Selected by the artist herself, the 134 drawings reproduced in this volume preserve the traces of their making—the corrections, hesitations, and fleeting hopes that accompanied each page. Together, they form an intimate visual narrative of a lifelong search, revealing the evolution of an artist for whom drawing is both a way of thinking and a way of questioning the world.