1921-2014,
France
Odile Noll is a French artist and craftswoman, the daughter of the famous sculptor Alexandre Noll (1890-1970). As a well-gifted woodworker, she followed her father’s path, giving life to small decorative objects: her pieces are noble and sharp. She inherited from the family know-how both passion and technicality.
The Noll family comes originally from Alsace. They discovered woodworking techniques in the 1920s: after working in an office, Alexandre Noll quickly became an artist sculptor choosing naturally wood as his medium.
Alexandre Noll left a mark on her daughter: he taught her the subtleties of wood and how to handle the tools to bring it to life. Her father was not a cheap instructor: he first shared with her his passion for music – he was formerly an oboist and had accompanied the dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) – and father and daughter hummed together in the workshop. This workshop is the privileged place of their common love. Odile Noll spoke of their relationship as real partners in crime: “little by little, I was full of his knowledge, learning the beauty of artistic creation, the truth of his work & his evolution towards more depth, more voluptuousness… the result of relentless research towards the perfection of a form.”
Alexandre Noll’s art is characterized by a strong hand-work, clearly visible on each objects that he models, between rusticity and abstraction; immediately amateurs are attracted to touch them, to feel them. Odile Noll follows her father path, both technically and aesthetically. The shapes of her wooden objects are sometimes smooth, sometimes rough: she plays with a certain immateriality of the forms. Multiple beauties can define her work because every angles are important: she plays on the dichotomy aesthetic. Usual objects or sculptures? There is no difference in Odile Noll’s creations.
Odile Noll is a French woman designer who had learned from the best, her father. She thus delivers a production of solid sculpted pieces, playing with polished and rough parts. She has a sensitive approach of the object as well as the material itself.
