By Morgan Meier
In November, the design world continues to ramp up to December and Design Miami with new shows, from Salon of Art + Design at the Park Avenue Armory, to openings at Friedman Benda, Superhouse, and Salon 94, among many others. There’s a new homewares and grocery café courtesy of Flynn McGarry, owner of Lower East Side wine bar Gem Wine, and in midtown at Lever House, we’ll get some monumental Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen pieces, including some of the jumbo-size Pop Art sculptures that made them modern art royalty.
Machine-Nature Mashups at Friedman Benda
At “Obsessed by Nature,” a Ferrari car seat is perched on a bed of exposed rods and bolts and functions as a battery-operated rocking chair. A tower of pink, powder-coated steel is planted in a hefty stone, a floor lamp that looks salvaged from a factory floor. The rest of the pieces by Enrico Marone Cinzano at Friedman Benda are similarly unsettling. Using only found or discarded materials, the Italian artist recombines them into works that question what is trash and what is functional, and knit-together industrial fragments with raw materials like marble, wood, and stone. Cinzano, previously a financier and property developer, has not had the typical artist’s trajectory (and his family lineage is also more glamorous than most — his great-grandfather was a founder of Fiat Automobiles and his family runs the Cinzano wine company). He has prioritized sustainability in previous business ventures, from a fashion brand to a home-product line. With his furniture design, it’s not just about recycling, the artist says, but a question of maximizing beauty and function in the materials of our daily lives. Opens on November 14.
