6 Must-See Design Shows in New York City Right Now

There’s a wave of design energy running through New York right now, with galleries putting on some of the most ambitious shows of the season. From a blue-chip artist like Urs Fischer reimagining furniture at Salon 94 to the New York–based Women’s History Museum’s bleak fashion dispatch at Amant in Brooklyn, design is being presented with as much drama and daring as contemporary art.

Eclectic, eccentric, and unapologetically bold, it’s an ideal time to see how New York’s galleries are expanding the definition of design. Here are six shows worth seeing in venues ranging from the palatial Salon 94 in the Upper East Side to intimate upper-level Tribeca spaces.

1. “Urs Fischer: Shucks & Aww” at Salon 94

“In some way all chairs or furniture are figuration. The figure might be absent, but it obviously has to relate,” said Urs Fischer earlier this month as he was installing “Shucks & Aww.” “The sculptures are about the figure and the body.” Seating, surprisingly, has been at the core of his practice for years. “Of course you all know his sculptural practice,” said Salon 94 founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. “He takes a humble chair, and turns it into art. Now he’s reversed it and taken his art of the chair and turned it back into a functional object. So the first floor is actually a retrospective of his chair as sculpture, and then the second floor is his actual practice as a furniture maker.”  Artworks include a chaise made to look like a mound of clay but actually cast in polyurethane, a full-scale candle of art mogul Peter Brant leaning on a chair, and a toilet brimming with fresh fruit.

Upstairs the functional design pieces are every bit as outlandish, only this time you can sit in them. Among the standouts is , which looks like a ruin of an ordinary kitchen chair but is in fact cast in painted bronze, complete with a curling antenna that sprouts from its back. Then there’s , a mint-green straight-back perched atop a canary-yellow dog that doubles as its base. It’s all part of a full-blown product line that spans tables, lamps, mirrors, carpets, and seating galore. Scattered among these is the enchanting , a glittering installation of 700 hand-blown mirrored glass droplets that descend like a surreal storm. All of these are available in limited-edition batches.

The show is playfully subversive, and nowhere more so than in . Inspired by a pile of garbage bags, it inevitably calls to mind the  by Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios—the stunt couch of Design Miami 2022. But where Nuriev’s version looked like creepy set decor for , Fischer’s is pitch-perfect and chic. “You’re supposed to sink into it like a bag of leaves in the fall,” said Greenberg Rohatyn. The couch comes in a range of colors, but the subtly varied browns on view here are especially covetable, altogether it’s both comfy and oddly beautiful.

But for me, it was all about the clever carpet: a floor covering printed to match the paint-splattered, scuffed surface of Fischer’s Los Angeles studio. Each carpet can be customized to fit a buyer’s space. It’s a trompe l’oeil gesture that is not only oddly beautiful but also reassuringly practical—no need to worry about spills here.

2. “Colin Knight: Hero’s Wreck” at Superhouse

Richmond, Virginia–based artist and designer Colin Knight channels a –like thought experiment: what if design students were left with only the carcass of a downed plane? “He’s obsessed with World War II era everything,” said Superhouse founder Stephen Markos, “mid-20th century design, mid-20th century fine art.” In Hero’s Wreck (through October 18), the exhibition includes aviation-inspired fare like an armchair that makes you feel like a gunner peering from the turret of a B-17 and  is a shrapnel-chic hanging light that resembles a salvaged wing component.

Another standout chair mimics a survival raft packed with Labububu-sized infantry figures in life vests awaiting rescue. But the show’s pièce de résistance, , is a sofa–snowshoe–sled hybrid, tufted with sheepskin for comfort; its rawhide back, molded from the contours of Knight’s own body, hovers between the suggestion of a body bag and an unexpectedly intimate embrace. Knight’s fixation on war and memory stems in part from his grandmother’s stories of surviving the Blitz, and by invoking Joseph Beuys alongside the wartime ingenuity of the Eameses, he has forged a distinctive visual language—funny and quirky at times, though never campy—that transforms WWII fascination into a meditation on masculinity and survival.

3. “Carmen D’Apollonio: Salut, Ça va, c’est moi“ at Friedman Benda

For her fourth solo show at Friedman Benda, Swiss-born, Los Angeles–based Carmen D’Apollonio has conjured her most ambitious body of work yet. “Salut, Ça va, c’est moi” runs through October 16 and is comprised of anthropomorphic lamps that feel at once playful and possessed—but by benevolent spirits. “I come from figuration, so I just thought, how can I do it a little different? I just go from one piece to the other. It’s evolution,” she explained. D’Apollonio specializes in lighting that doubles as conversation pieces, blurring the line between sculpture and design.

Some are crouched, some are droopy, some are gloopy, some look like they’re melting off a table. One even takes the form of a cartoonish high heel shoe, its front serving as a platter. “You can put fruit in here, or your keys,” the artist said on opening night.  is a goofily ingenious two-part lamp that seems to grow straight through a wall.

doubles as a soft sculpture—larger-than-life and a little uncanny, it looks like a human figure leaning against a wall with a colossal lampshade for a head. This floor lamp has had it!

4. “Rich Aybar: Rubberworks”  at TIWA Gallery

Rich Aybar has quickly carved out a distinct design vocabulary—amber-hued rubber forms that feel both futuristic and primal, they are instantly recognizable. But what sets them apart is their sense of movement. “I really wanted the wiggle to be palpable,” he said. “A lot of people, when they first see the work, they immediately assume that it’s one of the other hard materials.” He added, “My rubber specifically comes from petroleum, so it’s also a necrotic material. I like the connection to ancient life or ancient death in it.”

In “Rubberworks,” Aybar expands his practice. During a residency at New Wave in Palm Beach, he learned to weld and began incorporating steel into his pieces, alongside sheets of natural Amazonian rubber sourced from the vine. At TIWA, these materials come together in lighting, vessels, and decor objects—including egg-like forms—that glow with a mix of industrial toughness and uncanny eroticism.

The sensuality is undeniable. “It would be disingenuous to deny that there’s a sexual component or a seduction in the work,” Aybar said. “There is the invitation to imagine yourself enveloped in this world—as a hug or as a fuck, or cuddle. All of this is what I hope to impart.” The results are clean and polished, yet carry a twist of the uncanny—“something nice and naughty… finished, but also a little kinky,” as he put it.

5. “Chris Wolston: Gilding the Lily” at The Future Perfect

In “Gilding the Lily,” the New York- and Medellín-based artist and designer Chris Wolston has assembled a nature-inspired collection with subtle hints of humor and extravagance. “I was partially drawn to Art Nouveau techniques because of its use of natural forms in creating abstraction,” he said.

A central motif is the Yarumo leaf, which Wolston gathers from his garden in Colombia. Cast directly into bronze and aluminum, it recurs across dining tables, lamps, and chandeliers, giving the collection a through line that anchors its exuberance in something deeply personal. “They’re all cut from my garden. I have a collection of different species, so everything is just really close to home,” he explained.

The centerpiece is a monumental credenza constructed from thousands of welded wax daisy forms using the lost-wax technique. Though delicate in appearance, it is nearly indestructible. “It’s almost a ton of bronze,” Wolston said.

Wolston also introduces wool wall tapestries woven in Morocco, designed first as watercolor paintings. “They’re sort of like these deconstructed lilies mixed in with traditional Berber motifs. And then there’s this other layer of distortion that happens in the hand of the artisan,” he said.

Another first for Wolston arrives this fall: his debut museum solo show opens in November at Dallas Contemporary.

6. “Women’s History Museum: Grisette à l’enfer” at Amant

What does one wear to the apocalypse? “Grisette à l’enfer” (“Grisette in Hell”), the first institutional exhibition by the New York–based Women’s History Museum—the art project and brand by Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan—reimagines the seamstress and shopgirl of 18th-century Paris as a figure wandering through a boutique blasted into the end times. Mannequins are dressed in gowns cobbled together from scavenged materials—porcupine quills, pelts, shattered glass, and casino chips—while an extremely uninviting pelted chair merges animalia with armageddon.

The whole thing has the feel of being homemade, improvised, and defiantly DIY, as if fashion itself had been rebuilt from ruins.

One part of the exhibition looks like a Tenement Museum tableau after the apocalypse. A mannequin in beekeeper-meets-bridesmaid get-up stands amid blown-out holes that reveal crimson skies and towering goth skyscrapers with crosses on their facades. Videos flicker with vintage runway footage, showing just how surprisingly wearable many of these garments are—you can almost picture them on a red carpet, if only someone would take the plunge.

Overhead, an electronic ticker unspools a delirious litany that succinctly sums up the show: “Women’s History Museum the rapture while wearing beautiful blinding gowns made of hilarious materials… lustful fashion shameless poisons anxious luxury nonperishable essence blissful waste melancholic vanity indefinite fantasy… filthy aspirations dreamlike apocalypse loud bones.” See you in fashion hell.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com