Kelly Behun Curates an Artful Showcase for Amelie du Chalard
To kick off the gallerist’s Assemblage series, the interior designer conceives a layered exhibition where sculptural works and painterly contrasts evoke the atmosphere of a collector’s home
Whether a sky-high Manhattan pied-à-terre or a windswept mansion on the East End, the sumptuous residences conceived by Kelly Behun always feel shaped by the exacting eye of a gallerist. Sculptural furnishings, vintage rarities, and breathtaking contemporary artworks coalesce in sophisticated interiors that seem effortlessly composed, each room a living tableau. Her curatorial instincts take new shape at “Against Type,” the debut exhibition from Amelie du Chalard’s newly launched “Assemblage” series, which invites visionary designers to compose idiosyncratic vignettes akin to a collector’s home from the Parisian gallery’s ample holdings.
Naturally, Behun sharpened her curatorial instincts while letting intuition lead, drawing together a rich array of artworks and furnishings plucked from The Future Perfect guided by an emotional and spatial logic that feels lived-in and individual. That means the show unfolds as an active dialogue between disciplines. “The art curation came first,” Behun tells Galerie of her approach. “I look to discover the unifying threads afterwards. They’re always there, but I prefer to unearth them after the process winds down rather than be consciously guided by a particular concept.”
Despite that fluidity, clear rhythms emerge. Behun paired Kees van de Wal’s jagged wall-bound compositions with the billowing mobiles of Choun Vilayleck, whose suspended paper and wax forms drift through du Chalard’s airy gallery like slow-moving constellations. “Their sculptural qualities initially appealed to me, their nontraditional shapes and forms,” Behun says. “I love Choun’s mobiles—they feel like another life force in the room with me.” Contrast, meanwhile, arrives in the form of Bruno Dufourmantelle’s moody oil paintings of nature-inspired scenes, where depth and surface seem to collapse into one another.
Set inside a spacious ground-floor loft with cast-iron Corinthian columns and a soaring skylight, du Chalard’s gallery intentionally reads like a collector’s sanctuary—an apropos backdrop for this exchange. “The gallery’s domestic scale encouraged us to think of the show less as a display and more as an experience of inhabiting,” notes du Chalard, who unveiled her SoHo outpost last year to much anticipation following renovations by architects Keith Burns, Tess Walraven, and Nike Vogrinec. “Kelly leaned into this, placing works in ways that felt instinctive yet surprising. The staging underscores how these pieces might actually live with someone, while at the same time elevating them beyond the purely decorative.”
The works are unapologetically expressive. Natalia Jaime Cortez’s towering installation of ink-saturated paper strips sways softly on eight fulcrums. Ramon Enrich’s color-saturated canvases depict softened buildings dissolving into dreamlike horizons, bringing quiet geometry to the exhibition’s emotive terrain. Elsewhere, Bonnie Colin’s canvases shimmer with ponds and lilypads bathed in dusky light, while Dominique Mercadal’s textured ceramics oscillate between burnished sheen and rough-hewn stone, grounding the installation with elemental weight. “What excites me is the unapologetic individuality of each work,” du Chalard says. “None of them are shy—they assert their presence, but when brought together they create a chorus rather than a clash. There’s a rhythm of textures, scales, and colors that makes the exhibition feel alive.”
That vitality mirrors Behun’s overarching belief that rooms and homes, like collections, should evolve with the people who inhabit them. “I have long held that the dialogue between art and design is instrumental to making your interiors feel alive, feel connected, and in a very real sense, exist in an ongoing and evolving conversation with you.”
Though Behun’s curatorial role is temporary, the imprint of her choices will reverberate through future editions of “Assemblage,” whose future editions will delve even deeper into the interplay between art and design. Every pairing in “Against Type”—no matter how improbable—pulses with feeling and intention. “With Amelie, in so many respects, I’ve found a kindred soul,” Behun reflects. “I was blown away by her understanding of how to juxtapose art and design. It’s inspiring to see the dialogues she allows to take place between objects.”
“Assemblage: Against Type” will be on view at Amelie, Maison d’Art (85 Mercer Street, New York) until September 27.