GRAY
1879 – 1976
Gray was born in 1878 in an aristocratic family from a small city in southeast Ireland, where she lived her childhood years. Her artistic tastes were formed in the art studio of the Slade School for Fine Arts in London. In 1902 she moved to Paris, where she lived many years as she continued to perfect the art of design and oriental lacquer. Here she met Sugowara from Japan, with whom she perfected her knowledge in the use of lacquers, developing new objects for use in the home with surprising colors and smooth shapes.
In Paris she also met Le Corbusier who, recognizing Gray’s potential, encouraged her study architecture, which she did. At the end of the 1920s Gray became involved with the Union des Artistes Modernes, where she was a well known and appreciated member.
An unusual figure, unique in her time, throughout her life Gray wove her gifts as an artist and as a woman, with the most important events and protagonists of the history of the Modern movement in architecture.
The independence and the originality of her thoughts and her actions marked an intensely personal path as an artist and as an individual. “Art should be an extension of life.” This phrase, written by Gray in 1929, encompasses the deepest and most authentic sense of her research: from her first works as a craftsman and with lacquer, to her designs, and finally to her last projects. In the last years of her life Gray became increasingly alone, withdrawing from social activities until she finally died in Paris in 1976.
