Ado Chale

Ado Chale was born in Brussels in 1928 into a family of craftsmen, and learned woodworking early on from his cabinetmaker father before turning to metal and iron casting. Self-taught throughout, he discovered mineralogy on a trip to Germany in the late 1950s, and in 1962 adopted the name under which he has worked ever since: Ado Chale.

Nicknamed the alchemist of rare materials, Chale spent the following decades traveling to Arizona, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Madagascar in search of semi-precious stones — lapis lazuli, malachite, turquoise, amethyst, tiger's eye — which he began setting into resin in the late 1960s. His furniture treats mineral matter as both structure and subject, fusing stone, bronze, and aluminum into surfaces that read as geological cross-sections.

His work was shown at the Montreal Expo in 1967, and the following year the Brussels Hilton commissioned a series of twenty-five mosaic tables. Chale exhibited at the Musée Galliera in Paris in 1979 and at the Seibu department store in Tokyo in 1988, and his pieces have since entered royal collections in England, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Spain.

Chale's collaboration with Galerie Gastou began in the early 2000s, when he met Yves Gastou — a meeting that reoriented his practice toward the Mobilier Précieux series and brought his work to a new international audience. The gallery presented his work in 2002, then again in 2005 in an exhibition bringing together his furniture with that of Philippe Hiquily and Robert Couturier. In 2014, Galerie Gastou devoted a fifty-year retrospective to Chale, Ado Chale: 50 ans d'alchimie, tracing five decades of a practice built on the transformation of raw matter into object. The gallery has represented his work ever since.