In March, design events are multiplying along with new galleries in office buildings, apartments, and townhouses. On Bowery, a new showroom inspired by casinos and the American West displays lighting under a mirrored ceiling with steel-cut stars. Two vintage furniture dealers deck out a suite in a commercial co-op in Nomad with works from the 19th century to the contemporary era. And in Soho, the chairs that were carefully staged, suspended, or even lit on fire in Robert Wilson productions are now viewable from up close.
A new lighting showroom on the Bowery
Astraeus Clarke’s lighting and furniture is still made in Brooklyn, but now it has a place in Chinatown, at the studio’s debut showroom on Bowery. Co-founders Chelsie and Jacob Starley designed and constructed the space from floor to ceiling, a throwback to their past lives restoring and flipping homes in Utah. The wood-paneled walls, glossy lacquered cabinetry, and powder-coated metal make a moody backdrop for the company’s pendants and lamps. There are also a few rustic touches, like the window shades based on the pattern of a quilt handed down by Chelsie’s great-great-grandmother. All together, the showroom clearly reflects the brand’s two influences: the American West and the modernist metropolitan East. A curvy three-tier chandelier drops at the center of a built-in platform lounge, under a mirrored ceiling with hand-cut steel stars scattered above. Astraeus Clarke’s latest lighting series, the Darning Collection, also on display, includes a silver cylinder chandelier, sconce, and pendant with a stitched side like those on embellished denim. The showroom is open by appointment only.
In Nomad, two dealers combine forces
Two vintage-furniture dealers have joined forces (and collections) to open the Showroom, an appointment-only space in Nomad. Like many design showrooms these days, it’s staged as if you’ve walked into someone’s scrupulously styled, extremely well-curated apartment. Studio Nordic focusses on 20th-century designs, originating from and around founder Therés Lorén’s native Sweden. Carly Krieger, Lorén’s Past Lives Studio collaborator, casts a wider net, sourcing restored 19th- and 20th-century furniture — including but not limited to the Art Nouveau, brutalist, and Italian modernist movements. Her ethos is the more patina, the better. From Krieger’s collection, a brass table lamp with a flapper-dress-fringe shade by Hans-Agne Jakobsson perches beside Studio Tetrarch’s fiberglass coffee table Tovaglia, which resembles a white-draped tablecloth fluttering in the wind. Contemporary works are sprinkled among the Showroom’s older pieces: Cuff Studio reimagines retro furniture designs, like a swirly red chaise longue and faux-fur dining chairs, all of which are manufactured in Los Angeles, where the company is based. Open by appointment Monday through Friday.
Erwan Boulloud’s first show in two decades
Artist Erwan Boulloud presents 15 new works at “Touching Time,” in Tribeca’s Twenty First gallery. It’s the French designer’s first solo show in six years. Influences for Boulloud’s furniture range from the solar system to medieval jewels and even microscopic images of cells, and those are quite visible in the finished works. A decadent console with brass marquetry and embedded gemstones is joined in a pattern of barklike shapes. His boulder-shaped, steel coffee table, Roeco, is laser-cut on top and carved with radiating lines; sapphire gems sunken into the center of every ripple. Boulloud, a self-proclaimed “firm proponent of 21st-century craftsmanship,” creates these effects by mixing traditional techniques with new technology, for example 3-D printing a set of cocoon-shaped bronze sconces, a form the artist says would have been impossible otherwise. But it’s Boulloud’s elegant, heavy mechanical lamps that call to me the most: Top-heavy shades of veined milky alabaster stone are held upright by intricately grooved steel arms and bases. Closes on May 16.
For Robert Wilson, chairs are not always for sitting
For theater director Robert Wilson, the chairs that he designs for his productions are neither props nor seating. They’re essentially sculptures — some functional, others not, like a mesh metal chair made to cast time’s shadow, suspended in the air and lowered through the three acts of his production on the life of Sigmund Freud. Five decades of such chairs are on display in Soho at Raisonné gallery and printed as a hardcover book, with photographs by Martien Mulder. The materials range dramatically: bamboo, steel, iron, brass, even a single, taxidermied leg. For their collaborative production The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, Wilson made Marina Abramovic a rocking chair that rests on what appears to be wooden blades, and for his version of Italian opera Alceste, he made the Crocodile King (a doomed anthropomorphic king) a throne that makes incredible use of bamboo, with polished slat arms, ribbed back legs, and bamboo that’s ribboned, stretched, and fanned to create a seat back. Raisonné is open Tuesday through Saturday. Pre-order book here.
An Upper East Side wonderland
Marking another departure from the “white cube” format, curator Ashlee Harrison, a former Carpenters Workshop director, has established a private, appointment-only exhibition and salon space in a historic brownstone on the Upper East Side — just don’t call it a gallery, she says. The salon will host events and not just static works, and Harrison envisions it animated by talks, dinners, and readings in the evening. Her first solo-artist showcase there, “Through the Looking-Glass,” features Italian artist Irene Cattaneo, who explores the themes of Alice in Wonderland in the pieces on display. Cast bronze lamps coil and droop, and a bronze chandelier appears to sprout from the roof, with shimmering flower buds at the ends. In her Murano glass lights, you can also see evidence of the artist’s relocation to Venice in 2021. Elsewhere in the house, a cloud-shaped basin of imperial marble hovers off the wall and a beaded bronze lamp mimics a serpent circling into itself. Alongside Cattaneo’s pieces, Harrison has mounted other works from emerging artists to blue-chip giants on display, including Thomas Barger’s resin-coated paper pulp chair, California designer B G Robinson’s neo-space-age aluminum and faux-fur daybed, and wall works from Matisse, Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. Gallery appointments can be made via email. “Through the Looking Glass” closes on April 30.
More From This Series
- The Return of Archigram, USM Steel Beds, and More Design Finds
- The Furniture that Rick Owens and Michèle Lamy Designed for Their Paris Home
- When Designing Children’s Furniture Is a Highbrow Affair