Interior Designer Laura Gonzalez Conjures Artful Landscapes in Her New York Gallery
The French talent channels her affinity for world-building into an exhibition that forges scenic pairings with windswept canvases and her artisan-crafted furniture
When Laura Gonzalez unveiled her New York gallery last summer, the Tribeca address announced itself as a design wonderland buzzing with her nature-inspired artisanal furniture—much akin to an enchanting flower garden. Lilypad-shaped pendants cascaded in hand-molded glass petals, a branching chandelier bloomed with Murano cherry blossoms, and a statement floor lamp arched like river stones crowned with a silk himawari shade. A massive custom fireplace by ceramist Laurent Dufour, the salon’s unmistakable pièce de résistance, depicted a puppy frolicking in the wind.
That immersive language had already reached a far broader audience earlier this year at Printemps New York, where Gonzalez oversaw the French department store’s dramatic arrival on Wall Street. It now comes into even sharper focus with “Landscapes,” a new exhibition that frames the Galerie Creative Mind designer’s collectible furnishings as expressive terrains in their own right. Presented alongside scenic canvases by up-and-coming French painter Fabien Conti, the show traces how horizons and atmospheres can migrate from canvas to object and recasts the gallery as a place where sculpted light and textural surfaces echo the natural world beyond its walls.
Immediately setting the tone is a procession of Conti’s chromatic landscape paintings, where windswept grasses billow against luminous skies saturated with brilliant color. The canvases encircle a cluster of eight unique lamps designed by Gonzalez and crafted in hand-poured eco-resin by a Franco-American artisan, each meticulously sculpted to resemble a flower on the cusp of bloom, their clouded surfaces and marbled veining casting a nuanced glow. Each piece, Gonzalez explains, “reveals the imprint of the artisan’s hand and the poetry of imperfection.” Tones drift from Conti’s canvases, inspired by his memories of a trip to Japan, into the lamps’ translucent petals, forging a visual exchange that underpins the show. She likens the scene to a “gallery within a gallery,” arranging the works so they register as part of a continuous topography.
Elsewhere, audacious material experiments expand the show’s reading of “landscape.” A commanding dining table holds court, its technicolor resin surface reflecting a quilted patchwork evoking bird’s-eye views of farmland or perhaps the striped abstractions of Sean Scully. The tabletop is perched on statuesque wooden legs carved with the heft and verticality of tree trunks. Nearby, her dazzling Rocher table lamps up the ante with blown glass bases whose irregularly shaped bubbles catch and refract light to entrancing effect. “In every piece, craft and history become active agents. In our Rocher lamp, each bubble of blown glass, shaped and stocked one by one, carries the imprint of time, gesture, and human intention,” she explains. “It is this cumulative intelligence of the hand that renders every piece irreducibly unique.”
Other pieces throughout the gallery also make bold moves. A generously proportioned sofa curves in a continuous sweep while maintaining a traditional silhouette that borrows from the contours of rolling hills. Nearby, a ceramic-framed mirror by Véronique Rivemale evokes a bejeweled geological treasure, with hand-molded elements clustered into an irregular border whose glazed surfaces and pooled color defy conventions for the medium. A quartet of side tables reinforces that material mastery through chiseled bronze legs cast to resemble tree bark; they support a handmade glass top that seemingly hovers like sheets of winter ice. Close by, a sculptural table lamp tempers a sinuous yet weighty onyx base with a faceted paper shade.
“Landscapes” arrives as Gonzalez’s prolific practice continues to expand in scale and ambition. Beyond her star-making turn at Printemps, she revealed her first major stateside residential development with the Residences at Mandarin Oriental in Miami, completed Cartier’s dazzling boutique in the city’s Design District, and finished a slate of enchanting hotels, including Rome’s Casa Monti. Across those projects, she approaches interiors as their own distinct universes uniquely shaped by exquisite handicraft and close readings of place. “As I bend the landscape, I feel the spirit rise,” she muses. “Each piece becomes a quiet dialogue between nature’s forces and my imagination.” Put simply, her world-building sensibilities succeed at all scales.