André Dubreuil

André Dubreuil (1951–2022) trained as a painter and decorator in London before turning to metalwork in the early 1980s, working alongside Tom Dixon. Within the Creative Salvage collective the two formed together, he became a central figure of the new British furniture scene, developing a vocabulary of wrought iron, copper, and enamelled metal that treated furniture as sculpture rather than function — pieces such as the Spine chair and the Ram chair, both from 1986, remain closely associated with his name.

His later work moved fluidly between historical reference and pure invention, from cabinets and lanterns to clocks conceived, in his own words, as pretexts for small symbolic compositions. Dubreuil eventually settled at the Château de Beaulieu in the Dordogne, where he continued to design furniture, clocks, and trophies until his death in 2022.

Galerie Gastou presented Dubreuil's work as early as 1988, only three years after opening, in an exhibition titled André Dubreuil, Œuvres classiques / Œuvres nouvelles — placing him alongside Ettore Sottsass and Shiro Kuramata among the first generation of designers shown at the gallery. His baroque, hand-forged furniture became one of the defining threads of the gallery's identity through the 1990s, helping to establish the sensibility that would come to be known as the Goût Gastou.

Nicknamed the "Poet of Iron" ("le Poète du Fer"), he turned raw, rigid steel into forms that read as aerial and almost vegetal; his baroque, hand-forged furniture found a natural place within the gallery's identity through the 1990s, where he continues to hold a prominent place still today.