This holiday season, New York’s Steven Kasher Gallery is transporting visitors to the magical world of Mister Finch. From December 12 to December 23 the jewelry designer turned textile artist turned sculptor will display his fantastical sculptures. Modelled on flora and fauna, the pieces are also fanciful contradictions; beautiful, yet haunting, dangerous, yet alluring.
’He seems to have imagined quite a fantastic other reality, populated it, foraged it and has been good enough to share its spoils with us,’ says Michael Reynolds, the exhibition’s curator and designer and Wallpaper’s own US editor. ’Birds, insects, flora and fauna — all specimens that he has meticulously curated and fabricated with an almost Darwinian flair. Part modern day hipster, part Victorian dandy — Mr. Finch has always struck me as an eccentric whose obsession with the natural world rivals that of his 19th-century counterparts.’
In the exhibition, new fabric and wood sculptures will take viewers on a journey to an imaginary universe filled with lifelike creatures straight out of a Victorian-era fairytale. Mister Finch’s toadstool sculptures that look as if they had sprouted out of Alice in Wonderland will be on display, both in real form, and as wondrous photographs of them against velvet background by Patricia Heal. ’Patricia Heal’s work has always had a very timeless, haunted, dreamlike feel to it,’ says Reynolds. ’Both Finch and Heal seem to bridge time and space through their work. It seemed like a natural fit and I was curious to see what Heal’s response to photographing, and more specifically “capturing” the spirit of, Finch’s pieces would be.’
Better get a glimpse of the Holiday Pop-Up Shop of Mister Finch before it disappears along with the holiday season.
