Ballet Mécanique: Jay Ahr Returns to Sotheby’s
Tour Jay Ahr’s Ballet Mécanique—on view at Sotheby’s Maison Hong Kong now through 26 November—with the mastermind behind it all, Jonathan Riss.
Ballerinas in black tutus pirouette en pointe around white-coated automobile technicians in Jay Ahr’s seductive reimagining of Fernand Léger’s legendary Dadaist production Ballet Mécanique (1924). Through a Léger-esque kaleidoscope of uncanny objects and moments, Jay Ahr deconstructs the familiar and replaces it with something at once unexpected yet alluring.
“I watched her thighs shifting against each other, the jut of her left breast under the strap of her spinal harness, the angular bowl of her pelvis, the hard pressure of her hand on my arm. She gazed back at me through the windshield, playing with the chromium clutch treadle as if hoping that something obscene might happen.”
— J.G. Ballard, Crash
Moving his hand over one of the three gleaming Rolls Royce Corniche Coupés that anchor the new exhibition at Sotheby’s Maison Hong Kong, Jonathan Riss (whose initials form the gramogram Jay Ahr) describes the labour of love that his atelier mécanique of master mechanics, engineers, designers and artisans have undertaken on the 72 vintage Corniche Coupés in his collection. Each car, disassembled into over 70,000 individual parts, was studied, catalogued, and painstakingly reworked to “its limits” into an engine that would rival that of Formula One. “What someone can do today in one year was once two generations for a family,” remarks Riss, pointing out the “grand complications” behind the sleek chromium dashboard in the black Corniche Coupé once owned by the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali. “Everything works precisely together at the same time.”
“These new means have given us a new mentality. We want to see clearly, we want to understand mechanisms, functions, motors, down to their subtlest details. Composite wholes are no longer enough for us—we want to feel and grasp the details of those wholes—and we realise that these details, these fragments, if seen in isolation, have a complete and particular life of their own.”
— Fernand Léger
Riss sees no difference between the various disciplines of his artistic and design practice—whether it’s the handbags, which first thrust him into the public eye, dressage horse saddles, or daybeds. “It’s the same language that we use to build an automobile. It’s an orchestra of so many elements.” Riss references Jean Prouvé’s correspondence with the American sculptor Alexander Calder on how best to engineer large-scale sculptures as he plays with the utilitarian design of Prouvé’s 1950s SCAL beds—which were originally produced for hospitals, dorms, and even prisons—and Charlotte Perriand’s foldaway tablette pivotante. A shadow of a Calder stabile is painted across one glistening glass plane, with restored Prouvé springs visible beneath, while a corner playfully lifts into a backrest with a Calder-esque metal bracket.
“The object in modern painting must become the main character and overthrow the subject. If, in turn, the human form becomes an object, it can considerably liberate possibilities for the modern artist.”
— Fernand Léger
A subversive interplay of form and function makes itself most apparent in Jay Ahr’s famed leatherwork: a palm-sized ziggurat wooden stand inspired by the sculptor Constantin Brancusi usurps the function of a wood-grain embroidered Hermès Mini Kelly with its skeletal frame. An embroidered dragon that disappears mid-stroke on a scarlet Hermès Togo Birkin pays tribute to the Ming dynasty literati painters who believed that the idea precedes the brush (意在笔先 or 意存笔先).
In conversation, Riss moves easily between references to Nam June Paik, Tuareg shields (whose intricate details grace a number of Jay Ahr’s Hermès Mini Kellys), Prouvé (“the Picasso of design, the genius of simplicity, of engineering”), and even the multiple origins of indigo. The words of fellow collector and friend, Uli Sigg, “If I stop buying, I stop learning”—advice that resonates with Riss’s own prodigious appetite to learn.
“If you start to build a collection, it takes time, it’s a part of the story of the object. It can take a few decades to collect something. Pushing the boundaries of one piece is never enough.”
Catch Ballet Mécanique by Jay Ahr at Sotheby’s Maison from 5 to 26 November 2026.
