GOD & CO: Francois Dallegret beyond the bubble

Opening in November 2011, the AA School of Architecture will present an exhibition of the work of the French Montreal-based artist and architect François Dallegret (1937–). Dallegret’s own life and work denies anything so predictable as a neat synopsis, but in essence his work – beginning in Paris in the late 1950s and early 60s, and later taking in New York and Montreal – absorbs everything from intricate line drawings for a series of astrological vehicles and designs for a number of machines (from those that assist in cooking a meal to others that generate literature) to the ‘A Home Is Not a House’ collaboration with the critic Reyner Banham; a drugstore/gallery in Montreal; proposals for a new Montreal Palais Métro; designs for chairs, more cars and yet more machines; a film collaborative set up to shoot a western; contributions to the Montreal 67 Expo; bars of soap; subversive credit cards; ‘ironique’ villas and light installations.

Examples of all of this work will be on display in the AA Gallery in the form of drawings, photographs, films, cars and a small cosmology of objects designed and produced by François Dallegret from 1957 to the present day.

Launched in tandem with the exhibition, the AA will also publish a catalogue of the show, illustrating a great many of Dallegret’s works and also containing texts by Alessandra Ponte, Laurent Stalder and Thomas Weaver.

Exhibition curators and editors of the accompanying catalogue, Alessandra Ponte (University of Montreal), Laurent Stalder (ETH, Zurich) and Thomas Weaver (AA) will hold an informal conversation and exhibition tour in the AA Gallery alongside François Dallegret himself. The talk will lead viewers not only through the panoply of Dallegret's projects and career, but through the curatorial and editorial ideas and decisions that informed the book and exhibition. All are welcome and encouraged to ask questions of their own.

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