Between sculpture and useful objects: American art furniture on view at New York's Superhouse

‘The Odd Couple’ – a new exhibition at the New York City design gallery Superhouse –brings together over a dozen works created since the 1980s that exist somewhere between sculpture and useful objects.

It’s bookended by a pitch-black 1980 Howard Meister chair with a narrow five-foot-tall back and a 2024 Ellen Pong seat composed of a repurposed birch mould and ceramic tile. Between them are a 1989 Alex Locadia light sculpture made from resin and copper that hides a jewellery box, a 2005 two-person rocking chair by the studio woodworker Tom Loeser, and more. It’s surprisingly hard to distinguish which pieces come from which decade – a testament to the radical forms each artist has created.

'Every artist has a different perspective, a different working methodology, a different starting point, a different narrative, a different history,' says Stephen Markos, Superhouse’s founder and director.

The Odd Couple: American art furniture at Superhouse Gallery

While 'art furniture' as a concept emerged during the mid 19th century, the 1980s are a fitting starting point for a show that is as much about the past as it is the present, according to the design historian Glen Adamson. 'This was the time of postmodernism, of promiscuity between disciplines, of experimenting in public–without a control group,' he writes in an essay accompanying the exhibition. 'The tactic of ‘appropriation,’ that is the neo-Duchampian act of claiming just about anything and using it in an artwork, was widely practiced. The perfect conditions, then, for the odd coupling between art and furniture to take centre stage.'

Art furniture, also referred to as functional sculpture, is again having a moment. The appetite for conceptually daring work that offers utility has been growing over the past few years. This is especially true in New York City, which has experienced a boom in new galleries that specialize this intersection.

But then again, it never really left. Many of the artists in the exhibition - Michelle Oka Doner, Richard Snyder, and James Hong, among others - exhibited at the genre-bending SoHo art furniture gallery Art et Industrie, which the art dealer Rick Kaufmann founded in 1977, and continue to create new work.

Meanwhile, many of them are experiencing a revival. Gloria Kisch, who died in 2014, was the subject of a 2022 exhibition at Salon 94 Design; her stainless-steel In the Mirror piece is on view in The Odd Couple. At 82, Pippa Garner, whose Lampoon sculpture—a commentary on Reagan-era consumerism—is also on view has a piece in this year’s Whitney Biennial. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston recently acquired a 1976 wood lamp by Wendy Maruyama, now 72, who has a new blanket chest in the show (it debuted at Design Miami last year). She also has a solo exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum opening later this month.

In The Odd Couple, Markos brings together a number of practitioners who are contemporaries, but weren’t necessarily discussed as peers since they moved in different social circles and because of the divisions between the studio craft and art worlds. Today, the hierarchies between art, craft, and design still exist but they’re not as rigid as they once were. Shows like this demonstrate why contextualizing work outside of those classifications lead to a richer understanding of the history of material culture and the trajectory of expression through the category of functional sculpture.

Meanwhile, the contemporary pieces—including Kim Mupangilaï’s carved-teak lamp with a banana fibre shade that references an archival photograph of an African woman carrying a baby, a cabinet composed of jigsawed ceramic blocks Sean Gerstley, and a terrazzo table with a top that resembles a pool table by Ficus Interfaith—demonstrate how younger practices continue to build on what their predecessors made and benefit from more openness.

'What I love, generally, in putting together all of this work is just to kind of explore and connect works that were, by some groups, seen as entirely separate,' Markos says. 'I'm hoping this show will help people understand individual artists and their histories and then inspire them to go from there and do their own research to learn more.'

The Odd Couple is on view at Superhouse, 120 Walker Street #6R, until 17 August, 2024. superhouse.us