Design Salon by Barbora Žilinskaitė 

After studying literature and editorial skills, Astrid Malingreau moved to London in 2012 to work in publishing before beginning her career in the art market at Christie’s. She worked at the auction house in London and later in New York as a specialist in decorative arts and design. In 2019, she returned to Europe and operated as an independent art advisor based in Milan, while also becoming a regular contributor to specialized art and design press. Since 2023, she has been the Director of Friedman Benda in Paris, spearheading the gallery’s representation of designers in Europe and developing relationships with institutions and collectors on behalf of the American gallery.

Barbora Žilinskaitė (b. 1996) is a Lithuanian artist and designer based in Brussels, Belgium. Seeking to distance herself from rigid definitions of creative practice, Žilinskaitė approaches design through a sculptural lens, with a strong emphasis on material experimentation. Her work explores how functional objects can shift into something symbolic, performative, and alive through the use of anthropomorphic forms. By giving everyday objects a bodily presence, she challenges the boundary between the animate and the inanimate, inviting a more intimate and imaginative dialogue with the material world.

Her practice questions the divisions we draw between the human and the non-human, encouraging moments where logic softens and more intuitive, less visible layers of experience can emerge. Žilinskaitė’s work reflects a fundamental human impulse to animate the inanimate and to perceive objects as extensions of life — mediators between body and world.

She graduated in Product and Spatial Design from the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2019 and has since developed an independent practice in Brussels. Žilinskaitė’s work is represented by Friedman Benda and is included in public collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Odunpazarı Modern Museum.