Words By Allegra Salvadori | Photographs By Walid Rashid

At Paris Design Week 2025, Galerie Gosserez unveils Whispers of the Forest, a solo exhibition by Lebanese designer Georges Mohasseb, founder of Studio Manda. Running until September 27 at Le Point G, the show is a lyrical exploration of form, material, and memory.

The exhibition introduces two new collectible series — the Tapir and Rhino collections — where sculptural furniture takes inspiration from the silhouettes of these animals. In the Tapir pieces, shaped wenge wood reveals its noble gradations of tone, while seats upholstered in Dedar fabrics bring a tactile sophistication. Comfort here is reimagined as both sensory and aesthetic experience.

The Rhino collection, by contrast, channels quiet strength. Two monumental sideboards play with fragmented volumes and hollowed curves, their surfaces clad in honeycombed oxidized concrete developed in close collaboration with Matterlab in Lebanon. Light dances across their textured skin, transforming functional furniture into resonant sculpture.

Staged in a scenography by Johanna Colombatti, the exhibition evokes the imagined apartment of a collector — a worldly aesthete whose travels left traces of exotic encounters. Carpets soften the atmosphere, paintings evoke faraway landscapes, and zoomorphic forms inhabit the domestic stage. It is a space at once intimate and fantastical, where design becomes storytelling.

For Mohasseb, whose practice has long embraced wood as a living, breathing material, Whispers of the Forest marks a continuation of his search for timeless expression. Each piece embodies the dialogue between exceptional craftsmanship and contemporary design — between nature’s whispers and human creation.

With this exhibition, Galerie Gosserez once again asserts its role as a champion of collectible design at the crossroads of art and craft, and Mohasseb affirms his voice as one of the most compelling designers emerging from the Middle East onto the global stage.