Starting this Thursday, the Demisch Danant gallery will present “Wonder Room,” the inaugural exhibit of French designer Maria Pergay’s work, “spotlight[ing] a key element of her oeuvre: an intense engagement with the exotic and the baroque.”
The designer, who is known for reworking steel into domestic furnishings, has also “consistently employed the most outré natural specimens, rarefied traditional craft techniques and fantasy narratives in an output that suggests magical realms or cabinets of curiosities,” explains the gallery. The exhibit, comprising five new furniture designs in addition to accessories, personal sketchbook drawings and archival pieces, will embody the “Wonder Room” of Pergay’s work. It debuts on her 86th birthday, November 17, and runs until February 11, in the gallery’s new Greenwich Village location.
Pieces include cabinets with carved black Gabon ebony handles decorated with bone specimens; the Table Galet, which includes fossilized ammonites along with rare stones; and vintage designs dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s, including lamps, small silver objects and other pieces.
