November 3, 2024“I’m building on the work of pioneers,” says Nicky Dessources, executive director of Salon Art + Design, the annual New York furniture and fine art fair. She is referring to Sanford Smith, who founded Salon in 2012, and Jill Bokor, its previous executive director. Smith, known to friends as Sandy, died in May, robbing the art world of a larger-than-life impresario. But he would be happy with how the 13th edition of Salon is shaping up. The fair, which opens on November 7 with a benefit for the Dia Art Foundation and runs through November 11, will welcome nearly 40 returning exhibitors and a dozen first-timers in the 60,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory.
Dessources, whose background is in architecture and photography, was in charge of operations and logistics for Salon for seven years. “My falling in love with design happened as a result of my involvement in Salon,” she says. Now, she wants others to experience that passion.
One way to make that happen is to show visitors how designers work. So, part of the armory’s foyer — which serves as a prelude to the dealers’ booths inside the drill hall — will be devoted to Giancarlo Valle’s study models. Valle, who founded his Manhattan-based interiors firm in 2016, builds rooms filled with his own sometimes whimsical furniture at 1/12 scale, as a way to test ideas. Designing on computers is efficient, “but you don’t have to contend with gravity on a screen,” he explains, adding that, by contrast, “models don’t lie.” To Dessources, a better understanding of process translates into greater appreciation of the finished product.
Another goal, she says, is to make Salon feel welcoming. For help, she enlisted Brad Thornton, who founded the interior design firm Thornton Projects in 2021. Before that, he spent 10 years at 1stDibs supporting some of the most celebrated names in design, including Kelly Wearstler, Jeremiah Brent, William Sofield, Ken Fulk and Nicole Hollis. Now, he is working with Salon to transform the armory’s foyer with furniture, art and autumnal floral installations by Audrey Hilfiger, of New York’s Audrey in the Garden. Says Hilfiger, “We will be adorning the staircases with fall foliage and blooms, accompanied by nine-foot floral pillars, along with seasonal branches in urns that add grandeur and warmth to the entire setting.”
Love House, a Greenwich Village design gallery, will anchor the North Hall with a pair of alabaster monoliths by Marcus Vinicius De Paula, a Brazilian-American, California-born and New York–based sculptor. Each of the rectangular blocks stands about four feet tall and has channels for LED lights.
Tribeca design gallery Superhouse will showcase cast-bronze table lamps by Marcelo Suro, a Guadalajara-born, Savannah-based designer. The Dalí-esque Fool’s Gold lamp shines light in multiple directions, supplying atmosphere along with illumination.
In the South Hall, the Female Design Council, founded in 2018 to promote the work of women, will feature lighting, textiles, glassware and furniture created by its members. Two of them, Helena and Natasha Sultan, the mother-daughter creative directors of Konekt, will be showing their powerfully geometric Silo console table in oil-rubbed bronze with a blackened-ash top.
Down the hallway, frenchCALIFORNIA, founded by Paris-born, New York–based interior designer Guillaume Coutheillas, will turn the armory’s Board of Officers Room, one of the few surviving interiors by the Herter Brothers (active 1864 to 1906), into the frenchCALIFORNIA Parlor, a salon-slash-speakeasy where guests can socialize, relax and attend live programs. Coutheillas will use new furniture from Natuzzi Italia (including Memoria, a curved modular sofa by Karim Rashid) and Bang & Olufsen sound and video equipment. An Alpange piano, the musical equivalent of a self-driving car, will provide accompaniment. Coutheillas says what the instrument does and how it looks are both “amazing.”
Bossa Furniture
Inside the giant drill hall, galleries will be bringing their A game. Bossa, a dealer in Brazilian modern furniture, will be offering some pieces that took years to restore at its São Paulo workshop. Founder Isabela Milagre, who opened a Lower Manhattan gallery in March, says Salon will be her first real chance to meet American collectors and interior designers.
Accompanying her will be pieces from firms that, she says, “were instrumental in the development of modern design in Brazil but have since been largely forgotten.” One is a 12-foot-long credenza made by L’Atelier, a company owned by Jorge Zalszupin; the piece was created for Zalszupin’s own house. Another is a desk by the Italian master Franco Albini brought to Brazil by Arturo and Enrica Profili, founders of São Paulo’s Galleria Sistina, when they emigrated from Italy after World War II. Humbler but no less beautiful is Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC stool, designed for her SESC Pompéia community center.
Donzella
Among the Salon veterans, Manhattan dealer Paul Donzella is showing two gorgeous tables that couldn’t be more different despite both being the work of 20th-century Italian designers. One, a circa 1976 brushed-steel coffee table with leaf-like polished-steel extensions by Gabriella Crespi (1922–2017), is almost industrial; the other, a dining table with a carved-pine base that suggests antlers, circa 1995 and attributed to Pierluigi Giordani (1924–2011), is powerfully naturalistic.
In recent years, Donzella has extended his focus to ceramics. Making the two-mile trip from his Lexington Avenue gallery is a 42-inch Chris Gustin vessel suggesting a cloud or a bunch of balloons. Gustin is a Chicago native raised in California and now living in Massachusetts whose work is in dozens of museum collections.
Liz O’Brien
Liz O’Brien is also highlighting ceramics, specifically a range of pinch pots by Paul Briggs, who discovered clay as a high-school student in the Hudson Valley and never looked back. Each pot is made of a single ball of clay that Briggs neither adds to nor subtracts from but rather teases out into petals or leaves.
Rounding out O’Brien’s ceramics collection will be work by Irish artists, including two who are new to Salon: Nuala O’Donovan, who creates botanical wall pieces of unglazed porcelain, and Jennifer Hickey, who sews hundreds of porcelain wafers into delicate assemblages. Another treasure is a circa 1943 drop-leaf secretaire by American designer Samuel Marx (1885–1964). With its crackled lacquer finish and a row of arched-shaped nooks inside, it inspired interior designer Brian McCarthy’s concept for the booth, which features a series of arches framing the objets d’art.
Victoria Yakusha
Ukrainian artist and entrepreneur Victoria Yakusha will be showing several new bodies of work in a special exhibition. Her PLYN Sofa resembles three large stones but feels like the foam rubber that wraps its wooden frame. Her Tiara Vases, meanwhile, look like foam rubber but feel like stone. They’re made of ztista, the artist’s name for a moldable “dough” made of recycled metal, cellulose, wood chips and clay that hardens as it dries. In shapes derived from mythology and adorned with topazes from the Volyn province of northwestern Ukraine, the pieces represent the past, present and future of that country.
J. Lohmann Gallery
J. Lohmann Gallery will present a collection of contemporary ceramic and glass works. Highlights include wall-mounted porcelain assemblages reminiscent of rippling waves or coral, by emerging British artist Sara Dodd, and sculptures by Michèle Oberdieck that she describes as “imagined glass plants” and says are “meant to question the effects of climate change.” Another standout is Jongjin Park’s Blue Patchwork, a foot-high sculpture that makes porcelain look like stacks of fabric swatches.
Thomas Cooper Studio
Sally Thomas Cooper, an accomplished weaver and textile artist, and Jason Kai Cooper, whose background is in theater, lighting and product design, are the forces behind Los Angeles–based Thomas Cooper Studio. In their sophomore year at Salon, they’re debuting a Dalí-inspired mirror, in a frame of black or white French plaster, and expanding their extensive lighting collection with new fixtures that seem to reflect opposite sensibilities: Alma, a slab of alabaster in the grasp of a brutalist-inspired cast-bronze frame, and Threaded, a joyful series of hand-blown glass globes, cylinders and other shapes strung horizontally.
Todd Merrill Studio
Don’t expect to see a lot of right angles among the Todd Merrill Studio offerings this year. John Procario’s new sofa features sweeping horizontal and vertical curves, like a Vladimir Kagan taken to another dimension. And hanging over the sofa will be a large free-form chandelier called Medusa and suggesting the mythical figure’s mane. It’s a tour de force by Markus Haase, who worked marble, onyx and bronze into a seamless sculpture lined with LEDs. It will be accompanied by a pendant in aluminum and marble from Haase’s Circlet series. The booth will also contain tables by Hervé Obligi, who is new to the studio. Obligi, based in Montreuil, France, is known as a glyptician and a marquetarian (respectively, a gem sculptor and an inlay master), and he applied both skills to the round tabletops. Jamie Harris’s light fixtures are hanging totems of blown-glass orbs. Draga & Aurel, a Como, Italy–based couple, combine elements of Space Age design and Op art with minimalism’s clean lines to create colorful Lucite fixtures.
Maison Gerard
It’s fitting that Maison Gerard will be showing works that made their debut at another salon, the 1927 Salon d’Automne, in Paris, which gave them instant cachet. The pair of glazed-stoneware bas-reliefs are the work of François-Émile Popineau (1887–1951), who, as the official sculptor of Bourges, in central France, created statues for parks and gardens and war memorials, plus an impressive bas-relief for the facade of the city’s Maison de la Culture. Before being acquired by the gallery, the 44-by-65-inch panels, which depict the Three Graces, were recessed into opposite walls of a living room in Bourges. Maison Gerard’s proprietor, Benoist F. Drut, says similar architectural panels have been destroyed, plastered over or removed and then lost, making it “quite remarkable to be able to showcase this pair.”
The gallery will also be presenting several bronze pieces by the Irish artist Niamh Barry — including her Shouldering table, Ghost bench and On It Goes light sculpture — as well as a pair of Sun benches by Paris-based designer Marc Bankowsky, their gilt-bronze legs inspired by the great dancer Nijinsky.
Nilufar
Nilufar, the 45-year-old Milan-based gallery, is creating a dialogue between vintage and contemporary pieces. Among the former are an Ettore Sottsass mirror (1958), a pair of Model 589 armchairs by Gio Ponti for Cassina (1955) and a 1960s Arteluce ceiling lamp Model 2045 in lacquered brass by the Milan-based architecture firm B.B.P.R. Nilufar’s contemporary designers include Italy’s Andrea Mancuso, of Analogia Project, who will be unveiling her Terrario collection, created especially for Salon Art + Design. Its pieces range from table bases to mirror frames encrusted with shell-like porcelain disks, in colors from vibrant orange to deep brown.
Lobel Modern
Manhattan gallerist Evan Lobel recently published Alchemy: The Art of Philip and Kelvin LaVerne, a 300-page coffee-table book about the father-and-son artists whose work Lobel has shown for more than 20 years. Working with Kelvin LaVerne on the book, he came away more impressed than ever. “The LaVernes were not just artists, they were also chemists and physicists,” he says. Their process, which Lobel describes as “immensely complicated,” included burying their bronze pieces in soil to get just the right patina — “but they weren’t happy until they had tried soils from all over the world.”
At Salon, Lobel will be showing several important Laverne works, including the large 1970s four-door Tao cabinet in patinated bronze and pewter, with scenes of China rendered in enamel, and Grace and Harmony, a highly unusual pair of illuminated sculptures made of complex tubular branches welded onto bronze trunks. Lobel, actor Julianne Moore and interior designer David Kleinberg will discuss the breadth and impact of the duo’s work at a panel moderated by New York Magazine’s Wendy Goodman on November 9 at 3 p.m.
The same day at noon, 1stDibs editorial director Anthony Barzilay Freund will lead a discussion with multidisciplinary artist Michele Oka Doner and influential art adviser Allan Schwartzman titled “Creative Synergies: Blurring the Boundaries between Design, Jewelry, and Art.”
With the artworks installed and the panelists lined up, the last ingredients of a successful fair are the collectors. “Salon is great for seeing lots of people,” says Donzella. “You just never know who’s going to walk into your booth.”
