André Dubreuil, a French artist and self-taught metalsmith, seamlessly blended sculpture, furniture, and craftsmanship into a deeply personal and ornamental language—creating works of remarkable poetry and elegance.
Born in Lyon in 1951, Dubreuil moved to London in the 70’s, studying design and working as a decorative painter and antiques dealer. A chance encounter with welding in the mid-1980’s sparked his passion for metalwork and led him into the world of furniture design.
He soon found himself at the heart of a vibrant, rebellious group of designers working in London in the 1980’s — a scene that included Tom Dixon and Mark Brazier-Jones and came to be loosely known as Creative Salvage. They were making radical furniture from industrial materials - rusted steel, salvaged metal, “objets trouvés” - at a time when minimalism and high-tech design ruled the market. Dubreuil, however, brought something altogether different: a flair for the decorative, a reverence for craftsmanship, and a refusal to let adornment die.
His breakthrough came in 1986 with a solo exhibition titled “Furniture by André Dubreuil, The Necessity of Ornamentation” at Themes & Variations Gallery in London. The title alone was a manifesto: in an era obsessed with function, Dubreuil argued instead for beauty, for excess, for imagination, turning iron into ornament with an almost calligraphic flair. Over time, his work grew richer and more complex with the addition of copper, enamel, and porcelain, his furniture became a playground for inlays, patinas and intricate scrollwork.
In the early 1990s, Dubreuil returned to France, setting up a workshop in the Dordogne at Château Beaulieu, his family estate. There, far from the design world’s commercial circuits, he continued to create extraordinary one-off pieces — furniture that was structural and sculptural, expressive and enigmatic. In that way he defied trends.
His works are now held in major museums among which the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris and the Brooklyn Museum.