Marc Newson’s long-lost Olympic sculpture returns to view in Provence
A 6-meter-tall work conceived for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics is now standing again at Château La Coste, near Aix-en-Provence, after more than three decades in storage. Marc Newson’s Electra, a column topped by two rounded lobes, has been restored and installed in the estate’s grounds through June 21, where it anchors a new exhibition of the Australian designer’s work.
Newson first developed Electra in 1994 as part of a broader Olympic commission that also included Ron Arad and Alessandro Mendini. The brief, he recalled, called for works with a small footprint and strong visual presence. Produced by an aluminum foundry in Newport Pagnell, England, the sculpture was never installed in Atlanta. It was later transported in hopes of appearing at the Sydney games, but remained unused and eventually disappeared from public view.
Now, after Newson tracked it down and oversaw its restoration, Electra has been acquired by Los Angeles collector Philip Serafim, whose holdings include the Ford concept car Newson designed in 1999. The designer said the sculpture was made by craftsmen who had previously worked at Aston Martin, and added that it had found “the right owner.”
The exhibition is staged in the glazed pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect’s final building at Château La Coste. Newson described the presentation as a highly curated survey of 40 years of work, bringing together pieces that sit between design and sculpture and that resonate with the estate’s landscape of contemporary art.
Among the 15 works on view is the Lockheed Lounge, dating from 1988 and the earliest design in the exhibition. Most of the pieces come from museum collections, while the lounge was loaned by a private collector. Another highlight is a green-and-translucent glass armchair made in 2017 with a specialist in the Czech Republic, which Newson said was the most complex work to realize.
At Château La Coste, the show places Newson’s objects in direct conversation with architecture, collecting, and the sculptural landscape around them. Electra, once a stranded Olympic commission, now reads less like a relic of unrealized spectacle than a precise marker of Newson’s evolving language across four decades.
