Born and educated in Budapest, furniture and tapestry designer Mathieu Matégot moved to France in the early 1930s, where he worked as a window dresser and women’s clothing designer. He learned metalworking techniques as a prisoner of war in the 1940s, and upon his release began designing furniture, pioneering many of what we now identify as midcentury design tropes, like metal-mounted rattan, steel tubing, and perforated sheet metal. By the 1970s, Matégot returned to producing tapestries, many of which evoke Abstract Expressionist paintings.