Charlap Hyman & Herrero

Los Angeles and New York, United States

BIENNIAL PROJECT

Charlap Hyman & Herrero’s models depict the grand salon of Yves Saint Laurent’s and Pierre Bergé’s Rue de Babylone apartment in a state of flux. Reflecting on Luc Castel’s photograph of two art handlers removing Fernand Leger’s La Tasse de Thé, principals Adam Charlap Hyman and Andre Herrero have rendered the space throughout a transformation from complete to vacant. By evening, the salon is no longer the Proustian ensemble of art and design amassed by the couple over time, and not yet the individual works for auction in what Christies’ would later call the “sale of the century.” Like Castel’s photograph, the models portray a liminal space of objects as they pass from the deceased to the living, from kin to the rest of the world. Not a single part of the Rue de Babylone collection was sold until Saint Laurent’s death; Bergé felt it should be auctioned in its entirety, refusing to hold onto what he saw as elements of an indivisible whole. CHH’s models represent decades of passionate collecting, centuries of artistic production, and yet a mere moment in the life of a room and its ephemeral contents.

BIO

Charlap Hyman & Herrero is a New York / Los Angeles-based design firm that takes a fully integrated approach to conceptualizing and executing spaces in their totality. Principals Adam Charlap Hyman and Andre Herrero, whose backgrounds are in interior design and architecture, lead a practice that considers all aspects of the built environment, from site plan to furniture. Working in various typologies – including houses, set designs and stores – CHH endeavors to consider divergent art forms and the experience of multiple senses. They aim to create spaces that become worlds unto themselves, with gesamkunstwerk at the core of the firm’s objective.

Charlap Hyman & Herrero, La Calisto, 2016; New York, NY