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Elizabeth Garouste’s Noa Noa Coffee Table is like a conversation in progress. Composed of two interlocking forms — one saturated orange, the other deep black — the table reads as both a single sculptural gesture and a pair of independent objects. The pieces fit together in soft, amorphous curves, like puzzle parts that have chosen each other rather than been engineered to comply. Continue reading Eye On Design: Noa Noa Coffee Table By Elizabeth Garouste
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Created by British artist Gabriele Beveridge, the wall-mounted sculpture True Bone (2019) pairs hand-blown glass forms with chromed steel shop fittings, materials more commonly associated with retail display than fine art. Yet here, they take on a distinctly biological presence.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: True Bone By Gabriele Beveridge
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I always say that if I had a huge house (and limitless cash), I’d furnish it with pieces that look like they were lifted out of a cartoon acid trip. That said, I think this brightly colored, amorphous sofa designed by Misha Kahn ticks all the boxes. Continue reading Eye On Design: Misha Kahn Brûle River Sofa
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The Amoeba Rocking Chair (aka Amoeba Rocker) is named for its continuous, concave arched organic form that evokes the amorphous, single-celled organism.
Continue reading Eye On Design: Amoeba Rocking Chair By Isabelle Moore
Installation View With Rene Gabriel’s Bridge Armchair (All Photos By Gail)
The celebrated French artist César (born Cesare Baldaccini) was a founding member in 1960 of the Nouveaux Réalistes group. His amorphous bronze and glass Expansion Table (1977) is one of the rare works in which César applied his Expansion technique to a functional object. Whereas he also created a handful of bronze ashtrays, lamps, as well as the console commissioned by Henri Samuel, the Expansion Table is the object in which César philosophy — his belief that life and art are one entity, indivisible —achieves its apex.
Some background on César’s Expansions: One of the artist’s great breakthroughs in the late 1960s took the form of sculptural spills called Expansions. Realized with liquid polyurethane foam, a novel material at the time, each spill involved actively pouring specifically tinted foam, allowing it to expand, and then leaving it to set in a process that resulted in soft forms several times larger than their original liquid volume.
César was moved by this material’s freedom and energy — rather than conforming to the matrix of a mold, it actually spread and expanded in what would famously become a critically admired analog for the new spirit of liberation that marked the era. As Pierre Restany noted in 1970, “César’s expansions reveal a new phase in his work, the phase of maturity: the mastering of the technique allied to the freedom of form.”
Photographed at at Demisch Danant, Located at 30 West 12th Street in NYC.