April 14, 2024Chatsworth, a massive country house in Derbyshire, in the East Midlands of England, has been in the Cavendish family since 1549. Now led by the 12th Duke of Devonshire, the family has long been artistically adventurous in its tastes, a tradition embraced by the current, open to seeing the house as a backdrop for aesthetic exploration. That was never more true than in the summer of 2023, when the New York gallery Friedman Benda installed work by 16 makers in and around the mansion.
“This new exhibition is more than a generational update,” the duke wrote of the experience. “It is a significant intervention into the formal spaces of [the] house.” The show, “Mirror Mirror,” is now the subject of a lavishly illustrated book of the same name published by Rizzoli.
Each of Chatsworth’s ornate public rooms is a world unto itself. The curators of “Mirror Mirror,” Glenn Adamson and Alex Hodby, exploited that quality, taking a different approach to each combination of artist and setting.
They lined Chatsworth’s long, narrow library with torches made by Michael Anastassiades, composed of LED lighting tubes lashed with waxed linen thread to lengths of bamboo, each set on a pewter base. The result, they write, is “a glowing procession within this perspectival rush of space.” In one interpretation, the delicate fixtures are reminders of the days — actually, most of Chatsworth’s lifespan — when light had to be carefully tended.
Furniture by the British designer Faye Toogood occupies a chapel known for its spectacular late-17th-century baroque altarpiece. Her chunky tables and chairs try not to compete with, but do powerfully complement, the setting. And Toogood’s less functional pieces — her Standing Stones, reminiscent of ancient monoliths and cairns — are appropriately mysterious in the venerable room.
Outside, a reflecting pool and the hedge surrounding it form, essentially, a round room with a mirrored floor. The curators furnished the space with three three-person bronze benches by the late Wendell Castle, who, although best known for his work in wood, also created large pieces in metal. (These examples were derived from small models made by Castle, then digitally enlarged and roughed out by robotic carving tools, a technology he embraced in his 80s while revisiting works from early in his career.) Two of the pieces are supported by enigmatic cone-like forms, and all are carefully placed so that their deeply textured undersides are visible on the pool’s surface.
The curators chose a trio of three-person benches by the artist, two of them supported by enigmatic cone-like forms, to furnish the area. They carefully placed them so that their deeply textured undersides are visible on the pool’s surface.
The London-based former fashion designer Samuel Ross is “an explosive new star in the art and design firmament,” the curators announce in the book. His chaise and table, placed in Chatsworth’s sculpture gallery, pit roughly gouged marble against the silky carved surfaces of masterpieces like Antonio Canova’s The Sleeping Endymion (1819–22). And their orange-painted steel provides a jolt of 21st-century directness.
Pittsburgh-born, Cranbrook-trained Chris Schanck installed a cabinet made of scraps of timber, metal and foam wrapped in foil and coated in resin in the mansion’s Grotto, with its finely carved, figurative reliefs. The curators describe the pairing as “embracing the tension between dilapidation and opulence.”
There is much more, however, to the juxtapositions created throughout the show than the obvious rough versus smooth, hard versus soft dichotomies. Consider one of the most startling interventions, a collection of vessels by Ettore Sottsass. The pieces, in bright colors and appealing shapes, stand on three ornately decorated tables in the Great Chamber. They belong to the period, shortly before his death, in 2007, when Sottsass broke the glass-blowing rules by gluing together blown volumes, which vastly increased the formal possibilities of the medium.
The installation stands beneath the chamber’s lushly painted ceiling, Antonio Verrio’s 17th-century Return of the Golden Age. That title could refer to the arrival of Sottsass and his peers at Chatsworth for a few halcyon days.
