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An Artist Known for His Expressive Vases Debuts a New Bird Series in Tokyo
By Laura Regensdorf
In 2014, when the artist Dan McCarthy moved from Brooklyn into a converted schoolhouse in upstate New York, he decided the grand hall would be a future gathering spot for his many Facepots: large, wonky vessels decorated with a spectrum of grins and grimaces. The earliest ones, about a decade old, recall a time of emotional swings. “I hadn’t even found the clay that worked,” McCarthy says of that experimental phase, “so a lot of the pots were breaking in the kiln.” He learned to relinquish control, repairing the salvageable works using the Japanese technique known as kintsugi, in which mended seams are accented in silver or gold. The Facepots brought a new openness to McCarthy’s practice, as did the Hudson Valley. Absent the city’s pressures, he explains, “I was like a kid — on my hands and knees, lost in making a thing.” “Freedom,” a new monograph of McCarthy’s work, charts that arc, with nods to his Southern California upbringing, seen in rainbow-colored paintings of surfers and songbirds perched on guitars. Birds also animate new ceramic works in his solo exhibition at the Tokyo gallery Kosaku Kanechika, on view through Nov. 16. For McCarthy, these first faceless pots offer a shift in narrative. “Instead of a vessel, maybe it’s a nest,” he says, describing a fascination with his neighborhood birds. Kintsugi-like detailing appears on these pieces, too: Silver-leafed slabs camouflage the occasional split, while shiny rectangles evoke the little mirrors tucked inside birdcages. For the artist, fresh off his first flight to Japan, it’s a time of possibility. “I’m 62, which is old and not,” McCarthy says. “I think I’ve got another act in me. It should be an adventure.” “Dan McCarthy” is on view through Nov. 16 at Kosaku Kanechika, Tokyo, kosakukanechika.com.
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A Milanese Members’ Club Opens in a Historic Brera Villa
Milan is often derided as a gray city, all stone facades and treeless streets. But in reality, it’s a city of gardens — albeit private ones, locked behind gates and concealed within courtyards. Among them, hidden behind the hedges of Via dei Giardini (Street of the Gardens), are the verdant grounds of Villa del Platano — a 1950s apartment building turned private residence previously owned by Santo Versace, a onetime president of Versace and the older brother of Gianni and Donatella — where the Wilde, a members’ club, will soon open its doors. Founded by Gary Landesberg, a former chairman of the Arts Club in London, the Wilde spans four floors, with a rooftop terrace and outdoor tables in the garden for al fresco dining. The Italy-born, Paris-based designer Fabrizio Casiraghi planned the interiors, which channel the vintage charm of midcentury Milan. In the ground-floor restaurant, the Club Room, the most informal of the three dining spaces, a backlit ceiling resembling Art Deco-era stained glass casts a soft light onto glossy walnut club chairs, upholstered banquettes patterned with leaves and flowers, and a mirrored DJ booth for late-night soirees. Other gathering spaces include a library bar, a cigar lounge and several private rooms for meetings and intimate meals. One such room, attached to the top-floor Mediterranean restaurant Ava, features a hand-painted mural by the artist Assia Pallavicino depicting dancing couples and musicians — evoking the same feeling of bygone revelry that the Wilde hopes to bring to Milan. The Wilde opens Nov. 7. Prospective members can apply at portal.thewilde.com.
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Maria Pergay’s Stainless Steel Furniture, and Other Experimental Works, on View in New York
By Zoe Ruffner
In 1968, when Maria Pergay debuted her collection of curved stainless steel furniture, bending the industrial material past its perceived limitations, the Moldova-born, Paris-raised designer changed the face of French interiors. But by the 1990s, when the collectors Suzanne Demisch and Stephane Danant happened upon one of her alloyed designs at a flea market, the once eminent matron of metal — whose discerning clients had included Cristóbal Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin and Salvador Dalí — had slipped into obscurity. This month, the pair’s namesake New York gallery, Demisch Danant, which helped set the stage for Pergay’s early-2000s revival, is once again showcasing her work. Opening a year after her death at 93, “Precious Strength,” celebrates Pergay’s expansive oeuvre with an emblematic collection of about 35 pieces. Accompanied by a trove of samples, sketches and personal objects, her seminal steel creations, including the Ring chair and Three-Tiered table, will be on display alongside her later experimentations with lacquer, mother-of-pearl and precious woods — all of which are best experienced with Pergay’s own words in mind: “The only thing I want,” she once said, “is that the work not leave you indifferent, one way or another.” “Precious Strength” will be on view Oct. 24 through Nov. 30 at Demisch Danant, New York, demischdanant.com.
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A New Book Showcases Interiors and Goods by the French Design Studio Atelier Vime
Benoît Rauzy and Anthony Watson founded their design studio, Atelier Vime, after discovering an abandoned wicker workshop in their 18th-century hôtel particulier in Vallabrègues, a Provençal village on the left bank of France’s Rhône river. They became fascinated with basket-making and wicker furniture, collecting antique designs by everyone from Adrien Audoux to Charlotte Perriand, offering them to customers along with their own decorative accessories, created with the designer Raphaëlle Hanley. Now their obsession and aesthetic are on display in a new book, “The World of Atelier Vime: A Renaissance of Wicker and Style.” The pages feature imagery largely shot by the couple themselves, with tours of their homes (including their latest acquisition, a Louis XV-era château in Normandy), a survey of their designs — from the woven Medici column vase to the fish scale-inspired Écailles screen — accompanied by profiles of the artisans who forge them, and a look at the roots of wicker in Vallabrègues. “The World of Atelier Vime” comes out Oct. 29, $75, rizzoliusa.com.
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In Arcachon, France, a New Hotel With Minimal Interiors and Bay Views
By Alexander Lobrano
The French hotelier Jose San Martin describes his new 45-room property, Hotel Les Vagues, as his love letter to Arcachon, a seaside town 34 miles south of Bordeaux on the sandy banks of the shallow bay with which it shares a name. What’s certain is that the hotel’s visual modernity — all glass and concrete — has ruffled a few feathers in a place dominated by elegant 19th-century villas with slate mansard roofs built after the resort town was created in 1857 by the French Emperor Napoleon III. But its soothingly minimal interiors, including ceramic suspension lamps from Bordeaux’s Le Petit Gobelet, pine-paneled walls and dark wood parquet floors, are also likely to attract a new, design-conscious clientele. A spa with a plunge pool overlooks the sea, while the L’Écume restaurant features oysters raised in the Bassin d’Arcachon in front of the hotel; the cocktail bar, Rooftop, which has a list of Bordeaux wines from the region’s new generation of small organic producers, offers sweeping views over the bay. From about $215 a night, hotel-lesvagues-arcachon.com.
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A Manhattan Exhibition Shows Four Surrealist Artists in Visual Conversation
By Donna Bulseco
One hundred years after the French poet André Breton published his “Surrealist Manifesto” in 1924, a new group show titled “Hallowed Ground: Tanguy, Lam, Penalba and Cárdenas” at Di Donna Galleries in New York brings together four artists whose work reflects the art movement’s core principle — how dreams and the imagination open up everyday reality. “Surrealism taps into the unconscious and the irrational,” says Emmanuel Di Donna, who founded the Upper East Side gallery in 2010 with a focus on European and American art from 1900 to 1970. “Viewers relate to the imagery’s unexpected juxtaposition of inner worlds.” In the exhibition, which premieres this Friday at Art Basel Paris, each artist reveals their affinity for Surrealism — and each other — through a distinct visual vocabulary and materiality. The Neolithic menhirs of Brittany, where Yves Tanguy grew up, come to mind in his 1939 oil painting “Aux Aguets le jour,” with its stony totems rising from the earth in a Brittany-blue landscape. Likewise, Alicia Penalba’s sharp-edged bronze sculpture “Grand Totem d’Amour” (1954), has a shard-like verticality reminiscent of the mountainous Cuyo region in western Argentina, where the Buenos Aires-born artist spent time as a child. Wifredo Lam and Agustín Cárdenas both traveled from their native island of Cuba to Paris and drew inspiration from the Surrealist group. Mythic symbolism, birds and jungle leaves populate Lam’s oil paintings, while Cárdenas’s exploration of nature and the body comes to life in his sensuous sculptures in mahogany, African padauk and Iroko wood. “Hallowed Ground: Tanguy, Lam, Penalba and Cárdenas” will be on view Oct. 29 through Dec. 6 at Di Donna Galleries, New York, didonna.com.
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