Designs for life

If design makes the objects we live with, then art creates the images that lift us up, set somewhere apart from everyday life.

So what about an artist who had an enormously successful career as a designer? French-born Nathalie du Pasquier was part of the influential (and great fun) Memphis Group, which helped remind us that design doesn't have to be slick, black and rather humourless. Having returned to painting in the late 1980s, du Pasquier creates the kind of still-life pictures you can lose yourself in. Everyday objects seem slightly, oddly different, and they are more surprising still in Russia, her exhibition, until March 29th, at the Rubicon Gallery on St Stephen's Green in Dublin, where du Pasquier has gone back to her love of making things. She has built a cabin inside the gallery, where wonderful paintings, sculptures and other objects are to be found, including Orange Corner with a Pan (above). Deliciously surprising. See www.rubicongallery.ie