Mourgue, Oliver

Olivier Mourgue is well-known for his furniture design, but he is also a painter and landscape designer. Olivier Mourgue trained from 1958 to 1961 in Finland and also in Sweden where he worked for Maurice Holland, Nordiska Kompaniet in Stockholm. At Airborne where he worked from 1963, he designed his well-known classic Djinn chairs (1965) made famous by ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ by Stanley Kubrick. While designing for ‘Airborne International’, Mourgue also worked as an interior designed for the ‘Agence d’Architecture Interieure Gautier-Delaye’. in 1966 he established his own design studio in Paris. At his own design studio, he created furniture for French companies like Renault, Prisunic and Mobilier National. He also created a beautiful table- and floor lamp for Disderot, France which featured a stem with flower shaped shades. In 1968, he created a chair which he named ‘Cubique” which won the AID International Design Award. Olivier Mourgue’s most fabulous yet most unknown complete interior design project was made for Visiona by Bayer AG. From 1968 until 1972 (estimate), Bayer AG hired the most talented designers to create an entire futuristic display on board of a ship in Cologne, Germany. Each year, a different designer was hired. Joe Colombo made Visiona in 1969. Verner Panton made Visiona in 1970, Olivier Mourgue made Visiona in 1971 and Jack Lenor Larsen created the last Visiona, either in 1972 or 1974. During Visiona, Olivier Mourgue created an entire natural landscape with rivers, carpets that ressembled earth-grass- and other natural floor coverings, modular movable rooms. In 1976, Olivier Mourgue closed his studio in moved to Brittany, France where he became a professor at the school of Fine Arts in Brest.