John Wigmore / Chris Lehrecke
Herve Van der Straeten / Jerome Abel Seguin
Patrick Naggar / Eric Schmitt
Fran Taubman / Michael Anastassiades
Lianne Gold

John Wigmore is a lighting designer and artist who cites natural materials, Minimalism, and the Light and Space movement of Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s as influences for his first light sculptures in 1993. He has continued to work with established architects and interior designers to build atmospheric light installations globally. His latest work is in ceramic, inspired by the clarity and restraint of Mexican Modernist Luis Barragan’s architecture, the sensitivity of Japanese tea bowls and Californian ceramic artists, which he captured in clay, Japanese paper shades and light. They are all hand-built, not slip-cast, rolled out individual slabs of clay that Wigmore pieces together almost architecturally. He lives and works in Los Angeles, where his lighting is made. He rejoined RALPH PUCCI in 2014.

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.

Hervé Van der Straeten was born in 1965 and is an independent artist-designer who was first known for his jewelry creations, and now enjoys worldwide recognition for his furniture and lighting, which are instantly recognizable for the way he combines contrasting materials, bold variations of form and defiant volumes with perfect proportions, precision and detail. He designs and makes everything in his own dedicated bronze and cabinet making workshops and displays a selection of both his unique and limited-edition pieces in his own gallery in Paris. The artist-designer is also known for his projects with French luxury houses. Van der Straeten has received numerous awards from the French government during his career including L’Enterprise du Patrimonie Vivant and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. He joined RALPH PUCCI in 2004.

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.

Patrick Elie Naggar is a French artist, architect and designer who received his degree in Architecture from the Ecole des Beaux Arts and a Masters Degree in Urban Studies from the University of Paris. Naggar considers architecture (encompassing interior and furniture design) a central knowledge, a catalyst of the ideas, forms, plastic and artistic trends in order to create objects and spaces for our environment in the spirit of our times. Naggar received the prestigious best designer award in 2008 from the Foundation Center for Luxury and Creation Paris France. He joined RALPH PUCCI in 1995.

Eric Schmitt was born in 1955. In 1997 he left Paris to live and work at the edge of the Fontainbleau forest. In his workshop, pieces are created, designed and shaped and then entrusted to the best craftsmen in France. His creations are produced and signed in limited edition, a modern execution of the French decorative arts tradition. He joined RALPH PUCCI in 2006.

Born and raised in Baltimore, Fran Taubman graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1979 with a degree in industrial design and a BFA in Fine Art. In 1988, she established her first studio in Bridgehampton, NY and later moved to Shelter Island, NY, where she has lived and operated her studio since 2005. Taubman’s artistic passion is the fabrication of sculptural lighting and furniture using stock industrial materials (bronze, copper, steel) and machines. None of her work is cast. She also fabricates gates, balustrades, walls and doors by commission. Her goal is to reveal the beauty in the assemblage and joinery of stock metals. All of her work is fabricated in her Shelter Island studio in the spirit of the twentieth century American Arts and Crafts.