MARIA PERGAY
France

Maria was born to Russian parents in Romania in 1930, a chaotic period of major political turmoil in Eastern Europe, and then whisked away with her mother to Paris, only to endure renewed adversity during World War II. In 1947 Maria enrolled in the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques (IDHEC), where she studied costume and set design. She also attended during these same years the famous Academie de la Grande Chaumiere under the tutelage of Ossip Zadkine.

She began her career in 1954 when a close female friend of Maria’s asked her to assist her in designing objects for couturier window displays around Paris. “She thought that since I had studied at the IDHEC I would be able to  come up with beautiful, theatrical window designs. Above all, I had lots of ideas”. Maria began creating iron birds, usually costumed with fake jewels glued to the metal, and accepted assignments for fashionable boutiques including Torrente, Claude Tabet, and Durer.

Inspired by these projects,  Maria began experimenting with silver only a year later and produced an entire collection of contemporary silver objects the likes of which had never before been seen. She created a series of small-scale objects, including champagne buckets, letter openers shaped like belts, trays with silver tassels, and sleek cigarette cases. Maria then exhibited these pieces at the Salon Bijorhca of 1957 where couturiers including Hermes and Christian Dior quickly snapped up her inventory. With her increasing success, Maria opened her own boutique on 2 Place des Vosges to exhibit and sell her silver collection. At the same time, she also realized important commissions for clients including Henri a la Pensee, Dona Carolotta, Givenchy and Salvador Dali .

After designing objects in silver for over a decade, in 1967 Maria embraced stainless steel, an unconventional, new material that would become her trademark. In cooperation with Gerard Martel, owner of Ugine-Guegnon, France’s leading steel manufacturer Maria designed a unique series of furniture in stainless steel, a material that would change the face of French decoration in the 1970s. She treated steel as a refined material, exploiting its inherent beauty, coaxing it to bend at her will into a piece of luxury.

The notoriety of her designs spread quickly and led to private commissions for numerous individuals in the upper echelons of European society, including Pierre Cardin and the Shah of Iran. During ten busy years, she created original and luxurious furnishings and decors for a multitude of living environments. Such regal commissions continued in the late 1970s, when she went to Saudi Arabia to design the royal family’s grand palaces. She remained there for eight years, a woman working side-by-side the king.

When asked about her inspirations Maria replies “It’s the dialogue between materials that allows me to talk about what’s going on in a piece of furniture. It creates a kind of event that allows us to see the furniture, to prove that it has an existence, that it has its own life. I can’t look at materials as something inert. They have an aura”.