Inga Sempé: Designer and Creator

1. What is your very first memory of art?

Inga Sempé: Impossible to say: my parents were artists.

2. What role does art play in your work as a designer today?

Inga Sempé: Art doesn’t play a conventional role in my work. I hate being shut inside a museum or visiting galleries. However, I look at everything, everywhere, indoors and outdoors, in Paris, while travelling or hiking, always looking for what might be the work of an artistic mind. I’m sensitive to the beauty of a carriage entrance, a drawing on a book cover, a beautifully designed fabric…

3. How would you describe your creative world? What makes your work recognisable at first glance?

Inga Sempé: My world is very limited: it’s about objects designed for everyday life. I don’t think they’re recognisable at first glance, unless you’re really passionate about my work.

4. What inspires you, and where do you find your ideas?

Inga Sempé: I try to create objects that anyone can use, objects that are practical, easy to manufacture and have a certain charm, without necessarily looking ultra-modern. My ideas only come to me through drawing.

5. How do art and design interact in your practice?

Inga Sempé: They don’t need to interact. When you’re a designer, it’s obvious that the object you create should be both useful and beautiful.

6. How do you know when an object is finished?

Inga Sempé: When I think it’s successful for more than two days in a row.

7. Which artists do you admire, and why?

Inga Sempé: I don’t admire people until I’ve met them. But I love Saul Steinberg’s work for his free-flowing drawings, precise yet light and effortless, and Vladimir Nabokov for his multitude of richly detailed worlds, filled with seemingly insignificant details that stay with you.

8. Finally, what projects do you have coming up?

Inga Sempé: I’ll have a major retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2027.

Their Favorite Artworks