10 Collectible Design Shows to See in March
From Ferréol Babin’s exquisitely painted wood furniture to a survey of women designers whose lighting, furniture, and sculptural objects bear the imprint of jewelry
March marks a hinge moment in the cultural calendar, when winter’s introspective mood yields to more robust gallery programs ahead of the spring art fair rush. Across continents, dealers are wisely using this interval to stage thoughtful presentations that interrogate material and lineage. In Montana, a timely exhibition is plumbing the commonalities between 19th-century European furnishings and Indigenous masterworks, while in Warsaw and Cape Town, artists and designers are translating still lifes and ceremony into one-of-a-kind sculptural languages. Each of these ten shows deserves a prime placement on any design enthusiast’s itinerary this month.
1. “Shared Ground” at Emerson Bailey | Bozeman, MT
Bringing 19th-century European and Indigenous works into direct dialogue, this collaborative show with Shiprock Santa Fe traces how makers across Northern Europe and the American Southwest navigated commerce while sustaining their cultural identities. A Swedish Empire daybed attributed to Svartsjö Castle, for example, stands near a late 19th-century Navajo stamped silver horse headstall, each a symbol of prosperity within their respective culture’s value system. A Hälsingland folk armchair, meanwhile, neighbors Pueblo pottery and Apache baskets. Horses, reintroduced to North America in the 16th century, emerge as a central motif, as does the show’s location in Montana, a frontier territory at a key trading crossroads.
Until May 20
2. “Isabel Rower: Imago” at Marta | Los Angeles
Seeking to recreate the frescoed Garden Room in the Villa of Livia, the residence of Livia Drusilla, the third wife of Augustus, Isabel Rower has lined the gallery with ten botanical paintings rendered on antique bedsheets and tablecloths, casting a perimeter of dusky forests and orchards. Within this enclosure, throne-like stoneware chairs and vessels rise in hand-built ceramic, their veined glazes so convincingly marbled that they read as travertine. Her trompe l’oeil inquiry deepens through paper pulp tables with treated surfaces resembling carved stone. In other pieces, scalloped tabletops rest on marbled legs while epoxy ribbons and long-stemmed flowers sweep across tables and chairs with ornamental flourish.
Until April 4
3. “Crossings” at 53 West 53 | New York
Staged within a four-bedroom residence inside Jean Nouvel’s sculptural Midtown supertall, this group exhibition curated by nomadic gallerist Ulysses de Santi and advisor Ashlee Harrison channels the building’s exposed diagrid into a study of intersecting design histories. A rare 1935 Amadeo Maciel Residence Chair by Joaquim Tenreiro appears alongside an architectural buffet by Jorge Zalszupin and a two-seated chair by José Zanine Caldas, positioning Brazilian modernism at the core; contemporary works by Lucas Simões in polished stainless steel and glass extend that lineage through to industrial materials. Elsewhere, a sculptural bed frame by Irene Cattaneo reinterprets Alexander Calder’s famed headboard for Peggy Guggenheim through hand-welded iron curves and Murano glass inserts—a dazzling showcase of how design histories can overlap organically.
Until May 20
4. “Pentagon Gruppe: Silent Brutality” at Pulp Galerie | Paris
Founded in Cologne in 1985 by Gerd Arens, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, Reinhard Müller, Ralph Sommer, and Meyer Voggenreiter, the German collective Pentagon Group rejected Bauhaus orthodoxy and advanced a conceptually driven design approach that disregarded notions of comfort. Producing their own works in small series, the rule-breaking quintet favored raw metal, visible welds, sanding marks, and humble materials that prioritized process and often discomforted the uninitiated. More than 20 of their most notable pieces appear here, including a 1987 fold-down bed mounted on a compass-like floor-to-ceiling structure and the rotating Bookcase Shelf Unit for Cheap Glasses from 1988, whose suspended shelves transform basic storage systems into an entrancingly kinetic apparatus.
Until March 21
5. “Zizipho Poswa: Imbeleko” at Southern Guild | Cape Town
In her fifth exhibition with the gallery, Zizipho Poswa debuts a commanding suite of earthenware sculptures that reflect on motherhood as an inherited practice and living rite. The title references an isiXhosa post-natal ceremony that introduces a child to their ancestors while also naming the blanket used to carry a baby on the mother’s back. Poswa renders this ethos in rotund, broadly anthropomorphic forms that project outward like “the body that carries,” as she describes. Displayed on waist-height plinths, the large-scale works mirror the dimensions of the viewer’s torso to establish an immediate bodily relationship.
Until April 16
6. “Meet Me in the Middle” at St Vincents | Antwerp
Curated by gallery founders Henri Delbarre and Geraldine Jackman, this unique group show convenes eight female designers—Anne Büscher, Madeline Coven, Marijke De Cock, Kimy Gringoire, Marte Mei, Emily Thurman, and Hannah Kuhlmann with Lisa Scherebnenko—whose work bears the imprint of jewelry. On view are Kuhlmann and Scherebnenko’s floor lamps and shelving, Mei’s ceramic and wooden modular units created with Studio van der Zee, De Cock’s glass martini tables, and Büscher’s suspended glass mobiles. Each work exists on the threshold where jewelry’s logic (emotional, symbolic, personal, intimate) collides with the everyday functional demands of design.
March 6–April 18
7. “Ferréol Babin: In a Landscape” at Friedman Benda | New York
For his first New York solo exhibition, Ferréol Babin is debuting a suite of painted oak furniture that translates the picturesque countryside around his French workshop into immersive tableaux. Working with wood sourced from neighboring forests, he treats each surface as a canvas, improvising scenes that distill shifting skies, fields, and tree lines into bands of color. In works such as the Lands cabinets and Along the Path console, imagery settles across carved planes, while benches like Forest pair oak with upholstery that recalls mounds of tall grass. Elongated high-backed chairs with a carved bird perched atop and inlaid tables further embed bark-like textures and varied timber species into sculptural silhouettes inextricable from their locales.
Until April 18
8. “Still Life, Still Living” at Objekt Gallery | Warsaw
Still life ranks among art history’s oldest themes, and the style has long served as a meditation on time and the bond between humans and matter. This show translates the genre into three dimensions through works defined by authorship and experiment, proving the manifold ways the genre can be reinterpreted today. Wiktoria and Filip Bielicki transform scanned fragments of landscapes into aluminum furniture using Incremental Sheet Forming, producing relief fronts that evoke archaeological remains and geological strata. Zuzanna Spaltabaka and Igor Jansen inlay ceramic reliefs of bark beetle trails and parasitic growths into walnut structures. Agnieszka Mazur creates lamps from quartz sand and shell-infused dust, hand-layering the material so erosion itself becomes a visible structural component.
Until April 10
9. “Alexis Stiteler: A Tie That Binds” at Prospect Refuge Gallery | Minneapolis, MN
Prospect Refuge Gallery, founded by Minneapolis designer Victoria Sass, continues its dialogue with Midwestern makers through this solo exhibition by Minnesota artist and designer Alexis Stiteler, who works across furniture, clothing, and objects. Conceived as a collaborative presentation, the show gathers new pieces developed with regional makers and long-standing local businesses. Hand-built elements sit alongside locally sourced components, reflecting her lived ties to the Midwest, Pennsylvania, Texas, and the American Southwest. Among the objects on view are carved, wood-burned ash side tables with distinctive leg profiles, a matching mirror, and a folding screen illustrated with a vessel, snake, lemons, dog, and horse she recalled from her own lived experience.
Until April
10. “Sam Baron: Since You Left” at Cristina Grajales Gallery | New York
Conceived as a long table set for a shared meal and suspended in time, Sam Baron’s latest exhibition revisits the tradition of nature morte through a contemporary lens. Marble pedestal coupes and vases reveal the tactile presence of stone, while dazzling glass works created with Italian master glassblower Massimo Lunardon render fruits, leaves, and flowers as luminous decanters and domes. The installation also sees silver centerpieces branch outward into sculptural compositions and a monumental black Murano glass chandelier descend from ceiling to floor as a vertical axis within the room.