Born in Warsaw, Made in Brazil

There is a photograph that does not exist — or, if it does, no one has found it — of a fifteen-year-old boy in Warsaw sitting with a book in his lap. The book contained drawings by Le Corbusier, and the boy, whose name was Jerzy Zalszupin, would remember the encounter for the rest of his life as something close to a religious experience. What he could not have known was that destiny, in his case, would require a series of near-miraculous escapes before it could fully reveal itself.

Born in Warsaw in 1922, Zalszupin belonged to a generation for whom biography and catastrophe were synonymous. When the war broke out, he and his family fled Poland — Romania became a refuge, France a stopover — before he found his way to Brazil. It was there that Jerzy became Jorge, and that the boy who had once gazed at Le Corbusier's drawings became one of the defining voices of global modernism. His furniture has appeared at major art fairs and in the galleries of MoMA; ETEL, the distinguished Brazilian furniture house that holds the rights to re-edit his design legacy, has ensured that new generations can encounter his work firsthand.

Jorge Zalszupin's work is presented at the exhibition Warsaw – São Paulo – Milan An Exhibition of the Work of Jorge Zalszupin organized by the Visteria Foundation in collaboration with ETEL at the Torre Velasca in Milan.