Friedman Benda is pleased to present an expanded view of Faye Toogood’s Assemblage 7: Lost and Found, marking the influential British designer’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. First previewed in Los Angeles in 2022 and at Chatsworth House in 2023, Toogood’s acclaimed body of work makes its New York premiere. Showing her intimate process in a new light, Toogood uncovers new dimensions by poetically transforming her two chosen materials into pieces that capture and convey the essence of time.
Assemblage 7: Lost and Found is a personal exploration of what is lost, reworked, and reclaimed. With a focus on two mediums – English oak and Purbeck marble – Assemblage 7 is an exploration of the excellence of British craftsmanship and material landscape. Historically significant, both materials draw on the nation’s vernacular forms and traditions of making. Oak, a mainstay building material, is finished using shellacking, a time-honored fine furniture technique dating back to the 18th century. Purbeck, a rare limestone packed with shell fossils and quarried since antiquity, is sourced from a family-owned quarry on the Isle of Purbeck in southeast Dorset. It is hand-carved and chiseled, revealing the treasured stone’s stratigraphy.
A continuation of Toogood’s expansive way of working, Assemblage 7 represents her closest approach to traditional as well as modernist sculpture. While all pieces started as clay models, working with the actual materials felt, in Toogood’s words “like an archaeological dig: The block was a landscape, and I was finding my treasure within this block.” When carving, ancient material memories emerge into the light and take contemporary forms. Each piece, Plot, Cairn, Barrow, Hill, Hoard, and Lode represents undiscovered places and elements that had long been hidden —“something almost prehistoric that had been lost to time,” says Toogood.
About Faye Toogood
British designer Faye Toogood has emerged as one of the most prominent women in contemporary design today. “Whether you are a fashion designer, a furniture designer, or an interior designer, the materials you can get your hands on are essential,” she says.
Toogood was born in the UK in 1977 and graduated with a BA in the History of Art in 1998 from Bristol University. Upon graduation, she worked as a prop stylist at The World of Interiors before establishing Studio Toogood in 2008.
Working in a diverse range of disciplines from sculpture to furniture and fashion, Toogood often reinterprets and reinvents classical tropes and references from art history by introducing a new aesthetic. Since the conception of her immediately recognizable voluminous Roly-Poly chair (2014), she has been considered among the great form-givers of the 21st century.
Her career is marked out by the discrete Assemblages, each of which conjures a compact world of interrelated ideas, forms, and materials. Her first collaboration with the gallery, Assemblage 5, was inspired by a visit to Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence explored ancient animist notions of the elements water, earth and moon through a personal lens. In her most recent Assemblage 6, Toogood set out to “unlearn” the process of design and build a new vocabulary for furniture by recasting sculptural maquettes made from mundane materials found in the studio.
Her works have been acquired for the permanent collections of institutions worldwide, including the Corning Museum of Glass, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Denver Museum of Art, CO; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA. Toogood lives and works in London, UK.
