On View

French designer Philippe Starck’s pioneering work from the 1980s, which unabashedly subverted classical forms, is spotlighted in a trio of exhibitions in Paris. They evince the zealous interest in Starck’s output from that decade, which led to his becoming a household name through industrial products such as the lemon squeezer, Louis Ghost chair for Kartell, and innumerable hotels and restaurants worldwide.
Starck’s furniture pieces are included in the multi-disciplinary extravaganza “Années 80. Mode, design et graphisme en France” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (through April 16) alongside furniture by fellow designers Martin Szekely and Elisabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti, as well as Jean-Paul Goude’s graphic photography of Grace Jones and fashion by the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler.
His work is also the subject of two gallery shows: “Ubik,” the title of Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction novel after which Starck named his agency, at Ketabi Bourdet (January 20–February 18) and another at Jousse Entreprise (March 10–25).
Yet Starck, renowned for his radical and humorous vision, is bemused by the renewed enthusiasm for his 1980s production. “I’ll reuse the words of a friend: Getting older is awful,” he told Artnet News at Ketabi Bourdet’s preview. His attendance was a surprise for the gallery, which mounted the exhibition without his input.
“I don’t think anything of the past; I’ve always thought about the future but never about the past,” continued Starck, whose fascination with futuristic forms and materials comes from his father, an aeronautical engineer. “I’m very happy to see all this here with all these charming people, but it doesn’t concern me.”
Asked about the spike of market interest in his 1980s pieces, he added: “It’s completely artificial because they think that I’m going to die, so one must increase the market value. It’s normal speculation in the field of artistic creation.”
“What’s interesting is that the pieces were made with nothing,” Starck recalled. “We had zero money, no one believed in us, there was no investment, we produced the pieces ourselves. It really was an incredible adventure.”
Installation view, “Ubik.” Courtesy of Ketabi Bourdet.
The show presents Starck’s greatest hits alongside rarer pieces and exemplifies how he invariably quashed conventions, such as the traditional four-legged chair. Among these pieces are the Pat Conley II armchair (1983), its seat gracefully sloping to the ground; the Dr Sonderbar armchair (1983) in stainless chrome metal, its ellipsoidal form standing on just three legs; the black, highly graphic chairs Miss Dorn (1982) and Wendy Wright (1986), and the neon Easylight (1979), reminiscent of Dan Flavin’s sculptures.
Prices reach as high as €65,000 ($70,704) for the rare sofa Canapé Prince de Fribourg et Treyer (1987), which has been purchased by a Hong Kong-based foundation. Other pieces have been sold to younger buyers for whom the exuberance of the 1980s is a relative discovery, according to the gallery.
“Starck is the designer who really embodied the 1980s through advertising and unrestrained craziness,” said Paul Bourdet, co-founder of Ketabi Bourdet. Bourdet started collecting Starck’s furniture in 2015 while working at Galerie Downtown François Laffanour prior to inaugurating his gallery with Charlotte Ketabi-Lebard. “I was really looking at who could be the next [designer] in the market after Jean Prouvé and Pierre Paulin,” he explained.
Across the Seine in the 1980s exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs are pieces that pinpoint Starck’s institutional importance. Fauteuil Club (1983) was acquired during François Mitterrand’s presidency for the bedroom of his wife, Danielle, at the Elysée. Typifying Starck’s anti-bourgeois approach, Fauteuil Club upended the affluent association with classical armchairs by emptying the inside and embedding an aluminum-molded seat and two metal legs—eventually with just one.
Installation view, “Années 80. Mode, design et graphisme en France.” Courtesy of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.
“Starck is the best-known designer [from the 1980s] because he popularized design; his father transmitted to him the idea that research was a mission and that one should create for the largest number [of people],” said Karine Lacquemant, the exhibition’s co-curator. “His journey remains emblematic, from his commitment to innovative design to his talent as an interior designer (Les Bains Douches nightclub)—marking the decade with his visionary spirit.”
On the secondary market, it is Starck’s more recent works from the early 2000s and 1990s that have fetched the highest amounts. His auction record is for a black crystal chandelier, Lustre Zénith (2006), which sold at Artcurial in 2006 for €59,195 ($74,930).
The prices of his works from the 1980s are still relatively affordable, according to Florent Jeanniard, co-director of design at Sotheby’s. “The pieces that didn’t encounter commercial success at the time and are rare today are among the most popular and sought-after works,” Jeanniard said. “These prices, to some extent, are still accessible, enabling a generation of new and young collectors to make acquisitions.”
Philippe Starck, prototype of the Café Costes chair. Courtesy of Jousse Entreprise.
Indeed, Jousse Entreprise’s show on Rue de Seine on the Left Bank will feature several prototypes made for specific commissions. On offer will be a 1984 prototype of the three-legged chair for Café Costes restaurant in Paris (priced at €70,000) and a 1988 prototype of a chair for the Royalton hotel in New York, besides the refined Phil Lizner bar stool for Manin restaurant in Tokyo.
“I discovered Starck as a teenager and when I visited the Royalton in New York, I found it revolutionary because it was the precursor of boutique hotels,” said gallery director Matthias Jousse, who started collecting Starck’s works six years ago. “Starck is one of the only French designers known internationally, like Andrée Putman. What he made was very contemporary for its era [and] is still very contemporary in 2023.”
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The Bay Area’s newest institution, the ICA San Francisco, celebrated the final phase of its opening last night, unveiling its biggest gallery space with a compelling group show on the importance of celebrating Black beauty, rest, and self expression, curated by California artists Tahirah Rasheed and Autumn Breon.
Titled “Resting Our Eyes,” the exhibition features works from both big names and rising stars, with impressive loans by the likes of Carrie Mae Weems, Derrick Adams, Sadie Barnette, Genevieve Gaignard, and Simone Leigh.
Breon, who lives in Los Angeles, and Rasheed, who is from Oakland, met through the For Freedoms artist collective. (Group cofounder Hank Willis Thomas is among the artists featured in the show, along with his mother, photographer Deborah Willis.)
“So many people within the network just kept on assuming that we knew each other,” Breon told Artnet News at the exhibition’s opening reception. When they were finally introduced, the connection was instant.
Curators Tahirah Rasheed and Autumn Breon at “Resting Our Eyes” at the ICA San Francisco. Photo by Vikram Valluri for BFA.
The two have spent the past year curating “Resting Our Eyes,” which offers a taste of founding ICA director Alison Gass’s socially minded vision for the institution, which looks to focus on under-represented voices in the art world.
The show’s theme was inspired by the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists who began meeting in 1974.
“Basically the idea is that if and when black women are free, everyone else in the world will inevitably be free, because the systems that oppress black women would have to be dismantled and everyone else would benefit from it,” Breon said.
“When T and I started thinking about the mechanisms for freedom, we kept going back to leisure and adornment,” she added. “We were looking for the artwork that tells the story how we adorn ourselves and how we prioritize rest, because we see both of those as really necessary acts.”
See some of the works from the show below.
Adana Tillman, Wild Things (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist.
Gaignard, Look What We’ve Become (2020). Collection of Bob Rennie, Vancouver. Photo by Jeff Mclane, courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter, Los Angeles.
Sadie Barnette, Easy in the Den (2019).Photo courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
Hank Willis Thomas, Kama Mama, Kama Binti (Like Mother, Like Daughter) (1971/2008) from “Unbranded: Reflections in Black byCorporate America.” Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. Photo by Aaron Wessling Photography.
Carrie Mae Weems, The Blues (2017). Collection of Jeffrey N. Dauber and Marc A. Levin. Courtesy of the Dauber/Levin Collection.
Lauren Halsey, Untitled (2021). Photo by Allen Chen, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
Traci Bartlow, Girl Boss (1996). Photo courtesy of the artist.
Helina Metaferia, Headdress 1 (2019). Photo courtesy of the artist.
Carrie Mae Weems, The Blues (2017). Collection of Jeffrey N. Dauber and Marc A. Levin. Photo courtesy of the Dauber/Levin Collection.
Ebony G. Patterson, …they wondered what to do…for those who bear/bare witness(2018). Photo courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
“Resting Our Eyes” is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, 901 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, January 21–June 25, 2023. 
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Even the offhand mention of a Jewish deli evokes a world of smells and tastes: of hot latkes and matzo ball soup, of briny pickles and piles of pastrami. It’ll make your mouth water.
So will the New York Historical Society’s current exhibition, “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli.” The show, on view through early April, honors the rich history of the deli in pictures, videos, and relics from restaurants. On view are old photos, menus, and neon signs; vintage uniforms and fake food dishes; even film clips from Seinfeld and When Harry Met Sally (the latter of which inspired the name.)
And when you inevitably end up craving something to nosh on, well the museum has that too: throughout the run of show, New York’ Historical Society’s restaurant, Storico, is offering deli-themed menu options.
Reuben’s Delicatessen Menu, 1946. Courtesy of the New-YorkHistorical Society.
Organized by the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles—where it premiered last year before traveling on to New York—the exhibition posits the deli as a distinctly American phenomenon, one born in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries as waves of Jewish immigrants migrated from Eastern Europe, bringing with them the cuisine of their homeland: cured meats, smoked fish, bagels, and so on. 
“Whether you grew up eating matzo ball soup or are learning about lox for the first time, this exhibition demonstrates how Jewish food became a cultural touchstone, familiar to Americans across ethnic backgrounds,” said Skirball curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart—who organized the presentation with food writer Lara Rabinovitch—in a statement. 
At the show’s center is a universal story about the immigrant experience in America, past and present. 
It “reveals facets of the lives of Central and Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that echo in contemporary immigrant experiences” the curators went on. “It shows how people adapt and transform their own cultural traditions over time, resulting in a living style of cooking, eating, and sharing community that is at once deeply rooted in their own heritage and continuously changing.”
Mark Russ Federman’s mother, Anne, serves customers at Russ and Daughters in 1939. Courtesy of the New YorkHistorical Society.
After the exhibition’s run in New York, it will hit the road again, making stops at in Houston, Texas (May 4–August 13, 2023) and Skokie, Illinois (October 22, 2023–April 14, 2024).
“I’ll Have What She’s Having” tells a “deeply moving story about the American experience of immigration—how immigrants adapted their cuisine to create a new culture that both retained and transcended their own traditions,” added New-York Historical Society president and CEO Dr. Louise Mirrer.  
“I hope visitors come away with a newfound appreciation for the Jewish deli, and, with it, the story of the United States.” 
See more images from “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’” below:
Carnegie Deli, New York, NY, 2008. Photo: Ei Katsumata /Alamy Stock Photo. Courtesy of the New York Historical Society.
Menu from 2nd Avenue Delicatessen, New York City, 1968. Courtesy of the New York Historical Society.
Lionel S. Reiss, Frankfurter and Lemonade (c. 1945). Courtesy of the New YorkHistorical Society.
James Reuel Smith, Louis Klepper Confectionary and SausageManufacturers, 45 E. Houston Street, c. 1900. Courtesy of the New YorkHistorical Society.

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For design, like art, January is an important month. This is when top galleries and platforms around the world mount major shows, ringing in the new year on an optimistic note—and with unrestrained creativity.
This month’s offerings are no different. Dive into this selection of six design exhibitions—spanning Milan, Italy to Portland, Ore.—that push the limits of experimentation and self-expression.

Olga Engel and Sho Ota at Mia Karlova GalerieAmsterdam, Netherlands
Installation view. Photo: Jeroen van der Spek, courtesy of Mia Karlova Galerie.
In its ”Poetic Design” exhibition (through February 10), Amsterdam’s Mia Karlova Galerie contrasts the sensuality of Latvian talent Olga Engel and the minimalism of Netherlands-based Japanese designer Sho Ota.
Engel’s ”Charlotte” furniture collection is an ode to the harmonious lines of French modernist Charlotte Perriand (who was closely associated with Le Corbusier), while Ota’s “Splint” series of wood-block chairs explores how certain universal forms, in different compositions, can better facilitate modularity and personalization.

John Shea at HB381New York, United States
John Shea. Courtesy of HB381 gallery.
HB381 is the kunsthalle-style offshoot of the more established New York collectible design gallery Hostler Burrows. Since its inception last spring, HB381 has focused on showcasing interdisciplinary talents who attempt to free sculpture from limited definitions of art and design.
American talent John Shea demonstrates this philosophy with the transcendent ceramic sculptures in his “standard, abstract” solo show—on view from January 13 to February 25. His abstract sculptures are defined by intersections, where smooth geometric planes are interrupted by rough spheres. Shea’s shapes take their cues from microscopic silica crystals and the palette from Japanese painter Sanzo Wada‘s 1932 book, A Dictionary of Color Combinations.

Anne Libby and Philip Seibel at Magenta PlainsNew York, United States
Anne Libby, These Days (2022). Polished cast aluminum. Courtesy of Magenta Plains.
Philip Seibel. Courtesy of Magenta Plains.
In New York’s Lower East Side from January 13 to February 25, Magenta Plains is showcasing new wall sculptures by Los Angeles-based Anne Libby that riff on domestic window blinds. Cast in polished aluminum, the intriguing works play with light and deflected reflection as they cascade against stark white backgrounds. 
Berlin-based artist Philip Seibel’s “Gehäuse” exhibition runs concurrently at the gallery. Like Libby, Seibel challenges the perception of readily available construction materials and consumer products to create sculptural objects that serve as contemporary tombs, shrines, and ornate storage boxes. The works demonstrate his ability to satirize the typology of everyday items through meticulous craft techniques. He also distorts the pieces with engravings of agrarian scenes from the Middle Ages.

Jake Clark at Albertz BendaNew York, United States
Jake Clark, installation view. Courtesy of Albertz Benda.
Poking fun at the commercial iconography of his adopted city of New York, Australian ceramicist Jake Clark debuts his latest psycho-geographic collection “Canal Street” at Albertz Benda gallery. Ceramic vessels, key chains, mugs, and plates are emblazoned with the likeness of the signs and logos he’s observed around town as a self-proclaimed outsider.
This collection is a play on and elevation of the souvenirs that tourists can find on the very street where the gallery is located. The logos of recognizable haunts like Balthazar restaurant are joined by depictions of subway cars and ciphers.

Makers at Caselli 11-12Milan, Italy
Lewis Kemmenoe, Patchwork Cabinet. Cherry wood carcass and timber. Courtesy of Caselli 11-12.
(Left) Arnaud Eubelen, Lander table light. Old glass cover, cut wine glass bottle, rusted steel sheet, etc. (Right) Arnaud Eubelen, One Time Chair. Clothes rack tubes, burned fabric, etc. Courtesy of Caselli 11-12.
New Milanese platform Caselli 11-12 inaugurates its “Makers” series of shows with an exhibition dedicated to experimentation. Bringing together a whopping 29 avant-garde talents from across the globe, the showcase—on view through January 15—demonstrates how so many of today’s designers have taken it upon themselves to develop bespoke creative processes. Many are challenging the constraints of the design landscape by forging distinctly resourceful practices.
While Belgian up-and-comer Arnaud Eubelen creates furniture out of discarded building materials he finds around construction sites, New York-based Katy Brett sets out to evoke the quality of broken porcelain objects in the surface of solid wood tables and chairs. Many of the works on view are as thought-provoking as they are visually enticing.

Vince Skelly and Lynne Works Turner at Adams and OllmanPortland, Oregon
Vince Skelly, Redwood Arch (2022) and assorted tables and chairs. Courtesy of Adams and Ollman.
Back on the West Coast of the U.S., Portland gallery Adams and Ollman is closing out an exhibition featuring new sculptural works by woodworking savant Vince Skelly. Skelly has taken on the design world with his intuitive chainsaw and traditional hand-carved tables and chairs that evoke the ecology of the woods he sources from natural disaster sites.
Among the primordial wood pieces, minimalist painter Lynne Woods Turner has placed wall art whose lines and nuanced colorations suggest what isn’t there. A similar pensiveness carries through from her works to Skelly’s organic forms, creating a tension between these two oeuvres. 
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Park Avenue Armory has housed many masterpieces and Euphoria (not related to the drug-fueled HBO hit) is one of them. The feature-length film by artist Julian Rosefeldt, which opened November 2022, is a cinematic feat confronting global consumerism, class, privilege, and the failures of contemporary society.
The work encompasses five theatrical vignettes, the first featuring actor Giancarlo Esposito (who many will recognize from Breaking Bad) as a cabdriver waxing poetic to a mostly non-responsive passenger on their way to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. While the scenes that follow feel very “New York,” they also encapsulate a world that merges parts of the city with fantasy in the vein of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
Julian Rosefeldt’s Euphoria at Park Avenue Armory, 2022. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.
Shown on 24 screens in the round, the installation has three components: the feature film, a 360-degree perspective of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus shown to scale and in “real time,” and five additional screens, each containing a drummer. The drummers accompany the Brooklyn Youth Chorus whose voices fill the hall in harmony with music composed by Samy Moussa. The result is as jarring as it is soothing.
Looping throughout the duration of the exhibition, Euphoria is a commentary on the institution and neighborhood where it is housed, not stated but implied as the topic of wealth and class run throughout. The film is an enigma of sorts, a high-budget tour de force utilizing Shakespearean-style soliloquies and didactics. At one point, as Esposito’s passenger (also played by Esposito himself) walks away from the cab, he murmurs, “Remember: We are but dust and shadow,” quoting Roman poet Horace.
Film still from Euphoria, 2022. © Julian Rosefeldt.
Rosefeldt is the mastermind behind the screenplay, but is quick to not take credit.
“The credit for the writing doesn’t go to me, but to the more than 100 writers that contributed texts which were assembled into the text collages in Euphoria,” he said. “Creating a project on a topic as general as greed or capitalism is obviously ambitious, if not presumptuous, and the sheer amount of sources to be considered and books to be read was a bottomless pit.”
The chosen texts come from such notables as Ayn Rand, Plato, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, Barack Obama, the Rolling Stones (from the band’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”), and even Snoop Dogg (from “Gin and Juice”). All of these texts are expertly woven together in correlation with cinematography to create something entirely new.
The result is uncanny, as certain phrases are recognizable but completely removed from any familiar context. Rosefeldt works within his own container, inventing a world untethered to time or self-consciousness.
Julian Rosefeldt’s Euphoria at Park Avenue Armory, 2022. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.
“What helped structuring the text fragments once they were selected was that they needed to be speakable and performable in a convincing manner following a stream-of-thought,” added Rosefeldt, “which makes the viewer forget that these texts originate in various epochs within 2,000 years of cultural history.”
Euphoria echoes the desperation felt by Willy Loman from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the seamless visual weaving of The Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay, and a series of live performances at Matthew Barney’s studio several years ago.
Rosefeldt made a splash in 2015 when his video installation, Manifesto, starring Cate Blanchett, was screened at Park Avenue Armory (it has since been adapted into a feature film). On the two works, he added, “Comparable to the characters in Manifesto, the actors in Euphoria are more like vessels for universal ideas than real-shaped characters.”
Euphoria is on view at Park Avenue Armory through January 8, 2023.
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An immersive sculptural installation at the Momentary in Arkansas will offer visitors an unusual opportunity: to travel through time and space. The expansive work by Firelei Báez reimagines the ruins of Sans-Souci Palace in Haiti as though they were emerging out of the Atlantic Ocean, with the vastness of the sky and seas evoked by hanging blue tarps and a mural. The work is not only visually stunning, but explores the history of cultural exchanges between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
In an April 2021 conversation with Art21, Báez likewise addressed the colonial history of the Caribbean, but this time on the more manageable scale of the canvas, opening up about her experiences growing up in the Dominican Republic and her extensive interest in the region’s past and rich folklore.
“I remember always making,” she said of her childhood. “When I was six, other kids would have me draw out these very fancy ‘mariquitas’ [paper dolls] for them. I would have these elaborate ball gowns. They would always have very intricate hair. I was always dealing with the body.”
“One of the first reasons that I wanted to work on these paintings,” she said, referring to a series of botanical-based canvases she was filmed working on, “was looking at some of the first scientific illustrations of flora and fauna from the New World.” In particular, she referenced the scientific methods of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus: “So much of his work was sheer nonsense. It equated the New World Black and brown body with bestiality.”
Instead, Báez found inspiration in the misunderstood female creature Ciguapa, found in Dominican mythology. “The Ciguapa is this trickster figure. She is a seductress. Someone will be lured by her and then be completely lost and never seen again,” she said. “In reading my paintings of Ciguapas, I’m asking the viewer to come to terms with their own feelings around a woman’s body.”
“The normative tone of the story is these are wanton female creatures. They’re hypersexual and they derail culture. The understory is they are highly independent, they’re self-possessed, and they feel deeply,” she said of her preferred interpretation. “So who wouldn’t want to be that?”
In reframing such narratives, Báez continues to uncover new ways to “shift ideas of power.” “In that process, you shift the world around you,” she added. “That’s where beauty can be subversive.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series New York Close Up below. “Firelei Báez” is going on view through July 16, 2023 at the Momentary in Arkansas. 

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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of news-making artists. A new season of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series, like New York Close Up and Extended Play, and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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Twenty-five items form the colorful, tactile, and often humorous work of 14 women designers, both known and obscure, in the “Born Too Tall: California Women Designers, Postwar to Postmodern” exhibition at R & Company in Tribeca, New York.
“Southern California was a hotbed of creativity,” said Evan Snyderman, co-owner of R & Company and co-curator of the show with James Zemaitis, the company’s Director of Museum Relations. “And we thought, why not focus on unsung heroes—in particular the women who are often left out of the conversation, and are not in history books—and give them the credit they are due?”
Wendy Maruyama, Mickey Mackintosh. Photo: Joe Kramm, courtesy of R & Company.
The show sheds overdue light on novel approaches by women experimenting with traditional processes and materials. A curved plywood sculpture by Ray Eames—newly reissued in a limited edition—is instantly recognizable, while animal-shaped furniture by Pamela Weir-Quiton comes as more of a delightful discovery. While still in college, Wendy Maruyama used then-verboten particle board, instead of wood, and car paint to create her Mickey Mackintosh chair (1981), which is today recognized as one of the earliest and most iconic examples of postmodern furniture. Arlene Fisch, in the early 1980s, incorporated sewing techniques to create unique pieces of gold and silver jewelry.
Arline Fisch, Floating Square brooch and bracelet. Courtesy of R & Company.
“This is something we have been championing for 25 years as a gallery, and is now finding its place in the contemporary design and art world,” said Snyderman. “We see this coming together of all these practices, and hierarchies breaking down between fine art, craft, sculpture, and design.”
The title of the show comes from a chapter title in Fifth Chinese Daughter, a bestselling memoir by Jade Snow Wong, whose pottery is featured in the exhibition. It refers to the writer’s dim marriage prospects but also typifies the “biology is destiny” trope that hampered the careers of so many female artists.
Pamela Weir-Quiton, unicorn rocker and moose rocker. Photo: Tiffany Smith Studio, courtesy of R & Company.
Some of the participants in the show had felt held back because they were doing something new. “There were no galleries around for me,” said Pamela Weir-Quiton, who, conversely, didn’t lack for commissions in her frenzy of creation fresh out of college (where she was the lone woman woodworker). It took close to a half century for a museum—in this case, LACMA, in 2019—to come around to acquiring one of her pieces, which is also featured in “Born Too Tall,” the figurative Georgie girl dresser and chair in a mix of walnut, birch and ebony. “My stuff never fit in to the brown woodworking of the ’60s,” said Weir-Quiton. “It was animated. It had eyes. It connects with you.”
California being a state larger than many countries, the geographic peg of the show doesn’t conjure any visual through-line. There’s a boho earthiness to some of the pottery and textile pieces from the 1970s, countered by the lyric midcentury elegance of Greta Magnusson Grossman’s double cone lamp of the late 1940s. Some artists acknowledge inspiration from the sunlight, openness, diversity, and “energy” of the West Coast. More than half of the artists are not from the state, but worked, studied, or taught there, and remain associated with it.
Cheryl R. Riley, Brush Strokes Cigarette Table 1 (Gold). Courtesy of R & Company.
“I love the brightness, the light there,” said Cheryl R. Riley, a Texas native who lived and worked for two decades in San Francisco before settling on the East Coast. She has two cigarette tables in the show (a throwback to the time when a diminutive piece of furniture was designated for that activity). They easily double as stand-alone sculptures. She likens the medium to a sketch pad, or accessories, saying that their small size and low material cost allow for endless experimentation with shapes, colors, and finishes. “California is gold country, with the gold rushes, and there’s also the silver, with the Mexican culture.” She added, “I don’t have a fear of bling.”
The show, on view through January 27, 2023, at 64 White Street, also features work by Evelyn Ackerman, Claire Falkenstein, Trude Guermonprez, Merry Renk, June Schwarcz, Kay Sekimachi, and Marguerite Wildenhain.
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“When designing the Oblong collection, the goal was to match the simplistic, bulky, and rounded forms with striking materials,” said Sanayi313 co-founder Enis Karavil. Imperfectly shaped stools, consoles, coffee, side, and dining tables comprise the collection stemming from an intelligent use of knotted mazel and burl wood. Crafted by carpenters using thousand-year-old techniques specific to Istanbul, the pieces are available through New York gallery Love House.
Burl wood was popular in the Art Deco and Hollywood Regency movements of the 1920s and ’30s and again in the 1970s. Collected for its luxurious appearance, heavy weight, and aesthetic moodiness, the intricately knotted wood is again seeing a resurgence today as it crops up in architectural fit-outs and furniture designs.
Stools from the Oblong collection. Courtesy of Sanayi313 studio.
Sanayi313 got its start in fashion but now develops everything from interiors to home accessories. With residential design as its main market, the firm operates out of the rapidly transforming, post-industrial Ataturk Oto Sanayi Sitesi district in Istanbul. Within this dramatic setting, the firm is focusing more and more on creating contemporary high-craft pieces in rich woods that hark back to European and Middle Eastern antiques—a vast collection Enis has amassed over the years.
Though unmistakably bold in appearance, Sanayi313‘s Oblong collection is intended for a myriad of interiors. The new pieces—unified by a formal vocabulary of monumental planes, neotenic details, and bowed edges—are as much a celebration of contemporary sculptural design as they are an ode to Istanbul, a city of contrasts. For Karavil and his brother Amir, Oblong is a chance to demonstrate their ‘maximalist expression in minimalist form’ ethos.
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