Jerome Abel Seguin, Chris Lehrecke, Peter Morello & Ruben Toledo

September 2003 — New York
Artists

Ruben Toledo

Ruben Toledo was born in Havana, Cuba in 1960 and moved to New York with his family as a child. He is a painter, sculptor, illustrator, reporter and fashion chronicler, and renowned for his surrealist wit. The continuous, sudden changes of fashion and the body language of style are two constant themes of his work, which is inspired by a Latin flavor, but which is also strictly connected with American pop culture. He is the author of the famous Style Dictionary, a collection of unforgettable images, which under the form of drawings and watercolors, meld fashion at its most ephemeral with style at its most abiding. His decades-long collaboration with Ralph began when Toledo first designed a mannequin for PUCCI. The partnership continues, most notably including hand-painted surreal and whimsical images in limited edition on RALPH PUCCI Furniture which was called “historic” by New York Magazine design editor Wendy Goodman. He joined RALPH PUCCI in 1988.

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Jerome Abel Seguin

French artist Jerome Abel Seguin has lived in Indonesia for over 25 years. His work gives shape to large native wood species highlighting the natural heft of the material. His latest collection, “Archipelago: Wood, Stone, Iron” celebrated ironwood and iron wall furniture salvaged from scrap metal and machine parts, inspired by handmade ikat textiles from the Flores and Sumba islands in Indonesia. His Suiseki river stone sculptures are shaped over centuries by river currents, and collected by Seguin around Java, and prized for their position between art and nature. He joined RALPH PUCCI in 2000.

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Chris Lehrecke

Chris Lehrecke’s talent as a designer and his exquisite skill as a craftsman have firmly established him within the New York design community. Although a member of a generation of furniture designers who came of age in the 1980s, he has pursued a stylistic direction antithetical to the highly individualistic and often intentionally provocative work that characterized much of the innovative design of that decade. Marked by clarity and restraint, his furniture exemplifies a rational yet organic approach to design. His latest “Weimar” collection, noticeably different for Lehrecke because of its strong colors, was inspired by the architecture of his youth, as built by his father, and the shapes and palette of the Bauhaus. All of his woodwork is made in his studio in upstate New York. He frequently collaborates with his wife, jewelry designer Gabriella Kiss, who fabricates bronze hardware, as on their “After the Storm” collection utilizing trees felled in storms.

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