DCW éditions Mantis BS1

Driven by the same energy that led us to produce the light series of the French engineer Bernard-Albin Gras, we are pleased to present here those of an equally extraordinary artist, the English sculptor-designer Bernard Schottlander. As an admirer of Alexander Calder, in 1951 Schottlander created the MANTIS series of lamps. The movement is intrinsic to all the works of Schottlander: an artist, an engineer and, to a not inconsiderable extent, a handyman, he devised an intelligent counterweights system combined with a series of resistant and flexible metal bars. Even the shadow is one of a kind. Like an acrobat suspended in mid-air, it is made of aluminum using spinning and chasing techniques that are part of the inventory of engineering skills, but to which the sculptor’s eye has been created to create a helical movement in which the symmetrical and the asymmetric are in opposition. Its lights, with their eternal play between balance and imbalance seem to defy the laws of gravity.