Discover the Highlights from the Salon Art & Design Fair

1. Silvia Furmanovich’s Design Debut

Brazilian fine jewelry designer Silvia Furmanovich is revealing her debut design collection, a bejeweled homage to the Amazon. Presented in the the Armory’s striking Library Room, with windows designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Furmanovich has adapted her signature use of Brazilian wood marquetry in jewelry into a toadstool stool and a side table inspired by a leaf skeleton as well as beautiful vases, bowls, and mirrors.

“The idea is to create an installation evoking the natural world, recreating a piece of the Amazon rainforest, which provides a powerful, contrasting counterpart to the original context,” says Furmanovich. “We want to celebrate and preserve master artisans and craftsmanship by showing how long it takes to make things by hand. This collection is realized in collaboration with an exceptional group of artisans located in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. We will also be debuting sculptures inspired by Brazilian fauna by outsider artist Mestre André da Marinheira. We hope to evoke the riches of the rainforest and that unconventional, superb forms of craftsmanship exist in those remote areas.”

2. Ayala Serfaty at Maison Gerard

Since the 1990s, Israeli artist Ayala Serfaty has forged a unique path in the world of contemporary design, crafting conceptual lights and furniture. This upholstery of this chair is crafted with layers of finely woven felt and recalls organic forms of nature, like coral or crystalline rocks. Don’t miss her gorgeous cloud-inspired lighting fixtures, also on view at the fair.

3. Liam Lee at Patrick Parrish

It takes a moment to realize that the dazzling, brightly colored forms by Liam Lee are made from hand-dyed, needle-felted wool. The rising star’s work explores the tension between the man-made and the natural environment.

4. Pieter Maes at Les Ateliers Courbet

Pieter Maes’s new furniture collection is sleek, sensual, and fluid. Using wood, upholstery, and stone, the Belgian designer has collaborated with a group of master artisans in Europe using time-honored techniques. Following his passion for different periods of art history, from Neolithic or Cycladic periods as well as the primitive art expressions of modern artists like Isamu Noguchi or Constantin Brancusi, Maes offers a fresh take on timeless forms that are sure to impress any design aficionado.

5. Spin Love at Todd Merrill

This eye-catching table is the result of 15 talented craftspeople, working across different design categories, who each spent more than seven months making different sections, without knowing how the final piece would turn out. Spearheaded by Lionel Jadot, the completed table, titled Spin Love is the centerpiece at Todd Merrill Studio’s booth. Jadot, the mastermind behind Zaventem Ateliers, describes the unique and innovative project as “a ping pong or dining table, a sculpture, a screen, a story, a playground with unique features, lights and textiles.”

6. Studio Job at R & Company

Known for championing extraordinary collectible design in its many forms, the New York gallery is debuting a new series of large-scale, bronze illuminated sculptures by Studio Job. Founded in 1998 by Job Smeets, Studio Job combines traditional and modern techniques to produce once-in-a-lifetime objects. The weeping lantern crafted in polished and painted bronze playfully resembles a tired street lamp. Don’t miss the studio’s gallery exhibition at R & Company in the spring of 2022.

7. Steen Ipsen at Hostler Burrows

Steen Ipsen is a ceramic artist living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark who crafts hand-built circular, elliptical, and biomorphic shapes. For more exciting Danish art, be sure to visit “Matter at Hand: Ten Artists in Denmark,” a group exhibition of contemporary Danish art on view at Hostler Burrows in New York. 

8. Tamagawa Norio at Onishi Gallery

Taking part in the fair for the first time, Onishi Gallery represents contemporary Japanese metalwork artists. The exhibition’s title, “The Eternal Beauty of Metal,” is said to reflect the philosophy of Osumi Yukie, who was Japan’s first female Living National Treasure in metal art. She once wrote that there is “something particularly meaningful about the way that metals can substitute the permanent for the fleeting and transitory, conferring eternity on phenomena that would otherwise have a limited lifespan.” Don’t miss the dazzling works of Tamagawa Norio, another Living National Treasure, recognized for his intricate and totally unique metal-hammering technique.