What Would Have Been

What Would Have Been

FRIEDMAN BENDA 515 WEST 26 STREET NEW YORK NY 10001

On November 5, Friedman Benda is presenting an expansive view of What Would Have Been. An exhibition opening during a tumultuous and unprecedented global cycle of events, the show reveals a trove of design including over 30 studios and work originally destined for exhibition in galleries, fairs, museums across five continents.

What Would Have Been shows us what we have been missing and points forward; it fills in the blank spaces, offers new direction and represents a coming together of voices. The show tells a story of design that juxtaposes established designers with newcomers without predictability from either, and prompts a re-examination of assumptions consistent with current events at large.

The exhibition makes accessible design that lost its intended stage; works shown briefly before museum doors closed or failed to open at all in Atlanta, Aman, Ghent, Melbourne, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Shanghai, London, works commissioned for festivals and art fairs including the London Biennale, Tefaf, The Salon, Design Miami Basel and Design Miami; works that were slated for the gallery in Chelsea before the New York art community shutdown.

What Would Have Been provides a platform not only for work that lost its expected audience in 2020 but gives a first opportunity to engage with bodies of work and narratives that have come to brilliant fruition during this same time period. They emerged because of, or in spite of, the seismic shifts in the familiar political, social, and economic order. Consistent with the period that inspired it, What Would Have Been takes place not only in the gallery but also on-line marking the tension and dialogue between these two spaces. All works from both venues are explored in the following catalogue written by Glenn Adamson.

The works in the show are an affirmation of what can be accomplished when society retreats physically but remains hyper-connected digitally. They represent the uninterrupted dialogue and partnership with makers, studios, museums, and design audiences across the world that is at the heart of the gallery mission.

Jennifer Olshin, New York City, 2020

What Would Have Been Friedman Benda, New York, 2020

What if Picasso had never met Braque? What if Michael Jordan had gotten to play against LeBron James?

What if cold fusion reactors actually worked? Historians call such scenarios ‘counterfactuals,’ sometimes using them as the basis for extended speculation. Such an exercise can be a clarifying reminder of history’s fundamentally indeterminate character. Counterfactual history can help bring key turning points into sharper focus.

It can also be a springboard to the imagination, somewhat akin to the narratives advanced by Surrealism - which run alongside our world like a distorted reflection – but instead charts a coherent alternative, a fully mapped pathnot-taken.

The present exhibition is entirely factual, of course, but it has something in common with such thought experiments.

It takes place in the lengthening shadow of a year when the center did not hold. The project looks long and hard right into that unexplored landscape, whose full consequences are yet to reveal themselves, to answer a simple and poignant question – what would have been? The result may be surprising: an optimistic counternarrative, which disproves any presumption of paralysis, instead projecting an impression of resilience, ingenuity, and even continuity. A gathering of generative energies, the project conveys not so much what has been lost due to the pandemic, but rather how much is still happening, in spite and even as a result of the crisis. Incidentally, it serves as an index – a kind of core sample – of Friedman Benda’s activity level over the course of a given year.

The exhibition includes quite a few older works that would have been exhibited in various international contexts in 2020, but could not be; in this respect, it serves to unveil objects that ought to have been in the public’s view. It also shows that this year, designers have not stopped being creative, just because their exhibitions and publications and commissions and fairs have been delayed or canceled. They keep inventing beautiful things, made for us to enjoy.

They keep thinking, keep offering provocation as well as respite, food for thought. Most of all, they keep reacting. And goodness knows, there has been a lot to react to.

Even as the coronavirus forced New York into lockdown– closing Friedman Benda for a couple of months, along with every other gallery in the city – the design community was reconstituting itself in new configurations. Conversation migrated almost immediately to online platforms (and it was in this context that the gallery launched its series Design in Dialogue, co-hosted by Stephen Burks and myself, featuring in-depth interviews with people from across the field and around the globe). What Would Have Been participates in this extension into the digital realm, as the exhibition takes place partly in the physical gallery space, and partly online. This hybridization is of course nothing new in itself; it reflects an intensification of a trend-line we have been on for some time. The trajectory is not so much for objects to dissolve into virtual space, as has sometimes been predicted, but rather to occupy multiple contexts simultaneously.

retaining an impressive intellectual consistency. If Toogood destabilizes representation, and OrtaMiklos identity, Arsham does the same for temporality, creating works that seem at once ancient and futuristic, adrift on the shoals of time.

In each of these design practices, the object (whether seen in reproduction or in person) is only one facet of a complex structure, a space that can itself be entered and explored. Physical and digital artifacts adopt intricate relations with one another, which may contain elements of commentary, reinforcement, elaboration, contrast, and critique. This year has, in a strange way, been an ideal moment to explore that kind of richness. For what could be more satisfying, when social distance is pervasive, than to connect with brilliant minds, across the whole range of their expression? Having said this, of course, the Covid-19 era has also been a time for introspection. The scale of the tragedy, the challenges faced by so many, the enforced isolation: it’s prompted many of us to reassess our most basic instincts about what is important, a habitual activity of artists. Even as expansive networks have been fragmented – including the social frameworks of studios, like those operated by Chris Schanck or the Campana Brothers – people have held their closest kin even closer.

Some of the most powerful moments in What Would Have Been reflect this kind of quiet, internalized energy. There is the work of Najla El Zein, for example, in which complex human relationships are transmuted into equally nuanced allegorical form; or the densely poetic, politically charged ceramics of Paul Briggs, which materialize a resonant protest against the imprisonment of Black Americans. Andile Dyalvane, at a time of social distancing, has conceived a powerful project about social connectivity. Entitled iThongo, or ‘Ancestral Dreamscapes,’ it is his personal adaptation of a ceremonial seating arrangement (a “holding space” for community and ritual, traditionally known as iHlelo).

The project includes no fewer than seventeen sculptural seats, hand-built in ceramic; each is based on a traditional symbol of importance to the Xhosa people, which Dyalvane has adapted into sculptural form. Collectively, he thinks of the objects as “a gathering of dreams - seated in the soul, held by the spirits of our ancestors.”

As Dyalvane’s project demonstrates, even when times are at their hardest, artists respond, reaching out with their ideas to connect. This is also the raison d’être of Adam Silverman’s ambitious project Common Ground, which will be made from clay, water and wood-ash donated from all fifty American states, as well as six US territories. His plan is to transform this heterogeneous quarry into 56 sets – plate, bowl and cup – a metaphor of the hard work we must all do, to keep these United States truly united. The ceramics will be used for meals held around the country, cooked by chefs from different backgrounds, and attended by a cross-section of communities, once social distancing permits.

One can only imagine, right now, just how miraculous that will feel.

Designers have found various ways to respond to this accelerating tendency – the complex means by which their work now reaches the public. As galleries began populating the internet with “viewing rooms,” seemingly displacing the field of action from the physical to the virtual, materiality actually came to seem more important than ever, serving as an anchor for the free-floating, second-order experience of the digital ether. Designers seem to be more aware of this than anyone else. By making works that are carefully honed (Paul Cocksedge, Byung Hoon Choi), intriguingly improvisatory (Matthias Sellden, Misha Kahn, Toomas Toomepuu), or intensely process-led (gt2P, Thaddeus Wolfe), they communicate effectively at a distance while also insisting on the irreducible qualities of the object itself.

For Erez Nevi Pana, the pandemic resulted in an almost magical occurrence. A major series of his work involves submerging pieces in Dead Sea, where they accumulate a salt carapace. Because he was not able to travel, several of them were left in the water for months, producing thickly patterned encrustations new to his work. They are like physical demonstrations of the butterfly effect – the scientific phenomenon whereby an action in one place can, through multiple compounding reactions, produce an unpredictable result elsewhere. In December, people in China began getting ill; in the summer, Nevi Pana – whose entire practice is attuned to planetary ecology - pulled his chairs up from the deep, and marveled at what he saw.

Some of the designers in What Would Have Been complicate matters still further, focusing on the encounter of object and image as a moment of creative possibility. In Faye Toogood’s collection Assemblage 6: Unlearning, planned well before the Covid-19 crisis but completed right in the heart of it, quickly-made maquettes are recreated at full scale in exacting trompe l’oeil. This immaculate re-conception dislodges our sense of what’s real, leaving intact only the core principle of creativity itself. OrtaMiklos, a young duo fresh out of Eindhoven Design Academy, make objects using low-fi techniques, then deploy them in dizzyingly sophisticated performances, videos, and digital spaces. Effectively, they are making props for a continuous, multi-channel piece of theatre. They addressed the volatile experience of 2020 directly, executing a whole exhibition in the conditions of lockdown, accompanied by a major digital work entitled Temple of Confinement. Daniel Arsham’s work, similarly, refracts into innumerable aspects – expressed as architecture, furniture, luxury goods, graphics, sculpture, set design, and more – while

Samuel Ross is another artist who has carved himself indelibly into the story of this year. His new seating designs (in his words) “retain ancestral codes in relation to form, whilst reflecting a texture one must bear in the present to operate within such violently primitive, yet exceptional times.” emblematizing its potential to be a turning point for the better, a moment not of stasis, but of positive change. And this is just the sort of imagining that we will need, when we finally get out of this crisis, together. Right now – the fall of the tumultuous year 2020 – is a great moment to concentrate on hope, even if it is necessarily guarded. It is a moment for optimism, for ingenuity; a time to commune with individual minds, and the wealth of the collective. We ask what would have been, in part, because it helps us get ready for what might be; and in part because the question opens up a reality in which multiple, radical alternatives are intertwined: for art is the ultimate counterfactual.

- Glenn Adamson

Ini Archibong This year, the passage of time itself has taken on new qualities. The experience has been different for each of us, depending on our circumstances; but it has also made for a certain commonality, for the pandemic is something we have all shared and endured together. All of this makes it a perfect moment to commune with Ini Archibong’s Ritual Calendar, a work about time-keeping that is framed in radically universal terms. The premise of the object is simple, but unusual, for it flips the usual conception of functionality, asking you to do something for it. The upright, perhaps anthropomorphic form contains 31 small, relic-like “totems” (one for each day of a full month) that can be taken away in the morning, kept in one’s pocket, held in the hand now and again, then returned at night. The repeated act of removing and replacing the totems is intended as a calendrical practice, but also a spiritual one, a grounding in the now. The work’s resonance with ancient menhirs, and its rendering in marble, lend it additional gravitas – it is firmly set against the perpetual distractedness of contemporary life, the digital “updates” that constantly punctuate our lives, but hardly ever with this degree of mindfulness. Archibong’s year, while of course disrupted, has witnessed his own continued energies. It has been bookended by his participation in the important exhibition Speechless, curated

by Sarah Schleuning for the Dallas Museum of Art, and an upcoming exhibition planned for 2021 at Friedman Benda.

Ini Archibong [American, b. 1983] Ritual Calendar, 2017 Creole Beige marble 48.75 x 14.25 x 14.25 inches 124 x 36 x 36 cm

Ini Archibong [American, b. 1983] Obelisk, 2019 Marble, glass 58 x 16.75 x 16.75 inches 147.5 x 42.3 x 42.3 cm Edition of 8

Ini Archibong [American, b. 1983] Theoracle, 2019 speechless: different by design Dallas Museum of Art, 2019-2020

Ini Archibong [American, b. 1983] Theoracle, 2019 In October 2020, Archibong altered the design of Theoracle installation at the Dallas Museum of Art and crossed out its title in response to issues of racial injustice and the coronavirus pandemic. Archibong states, “In its original incarnation Theoracle was part of my continuing exploration of the melding of the ancient with the current in an attempt to create and continue dialogue about what it means to engage in the crafting of our own mythology as the children of the African Diaspora. This new intervention for DMA represents my feelings about the current state of affairs in my home country... We learn from a young age that you look beyond that yellow tape at your own risk. Whatever scene is on the other side may never be erased from your memory. Yellow tape means stay back or else.�

Daniel Arsham In December 2019, artistic polymath Daniel Arsham collaborated with Friedman Benda to realize Objects for Living, an installation at Design Miami/. Inspired by Arsham’s recent renovation of his own Long Island home (built in 1971 by the noted modernist architect Norman Jaffe), it was his most concerted foray to date into the design of functional objects.

This was no forced exercise, but a seamless segue: the seating, lighting, and shelving that he conceived, all set within a spellbindingly alien interior, continued lines of investigation that he has pursued throughout his career. Above all, this meant an engagement with temporality. The space, and the objects within, alluded equally to ancient history, modernist design, science fiction, and creative process. This year, the project was to be extended with a presentation in London, showcasing new pieces within the collection; the new plan is to feature them in an exhibition in 2021.

Daniel Arsham [American, b. 1980] India Sofa IV, 3019 Wood, upholstered fabric 30.5 x 59.5 x 32 inches 77.5 x 151.1 x 81.3 cm Edition of 8

Daniel Arsham [American, b. 1980] Philly Lamp, 3019 Birch wood, stone, resin 109.5 x 87 x 24.25 inches 278.1 x 221 x 61.6 cm Edition of 8

Daniel Arsham [American, b. 1980] Shanghai Chair, 3019 Resin, foam 36 x 36 x 36 inches 91.4 x 91.4 x 91.4 cm Edition of 8

Andrea Branzi In Italy it is common to refer to any great figure in the arts – design very much included – as maestro. The term has connotations not only of mastery, but also of broad comprehension, a position somewhat above the fray, as one might refer to an orchestral conductor. If there is anyone who meets this description, it is Andrea Branzi. Active for over six decades as a philosopher, critic, object-maker, urban planner, teacher, and much more besides, he is a one-man cosmos of ideas, who generates forms and concepts of infinite ramification. (This is the man, after all, that gave the world No Stop City). Included in the present exhibition are objects from three phases of his long career: his celebrated 1985 series Domestic Animals, which was foresighted in its postulation of a new relationship between people and nature; one of his extended series of cabinets (2010), poetic structures which meditate upon their own status as units of display; andVibrazioni, which – though made last year – looks very pertinent in 2020, with its suggestion of an axis mundi shivered into fragmentary vectors. Throughout his career, Branzi has considered utility as a field constantly in play; of one recent project, he has written, “Like everything else that, at the outset, appears pointless, they are destined to find their place in the long eternal moments that live outside of daily life, outside of history and of prehistory.”

Andrea Branzi [Italian, b. 1938] Lamp, 2014 Japanese rice paper, aluminum 104.5 x 24 x 24 inches 265.4 x 61 x 61 cm Edition of 12

Plank Cabinet 6 Drawing, 2014 “In the Plank Collection, the idea is to create a highly expressive climate within the environment; structures that are placed in the intermediate space between the object and the architecture. In general, it is an empty space, expressionless, where memory, color and nature can float...� - Andrea Branzi

Andrea Branzi [Italian, b. 1938] Plank Cabinet 6, 2015 Patinated and polished aluminum, wood and spray paint 63 x 94.5 x 17.75 inches 160 x 240 x 45.1 cm Edition of 12

Andrea Branzi [Italian, b. 1938] Vibrazioni, 2019 Optical acrylic, aluminum 79.5 x 27.5 x 19.75 inches 202 x 70 x 50 cm Edition of 12

Paul S. Briggs The Boston-based artist Paul S. Briggs has said that ceramics are, for him, a way to “philosophize concretely.” In this seemingly contradictory phrase, we already get a sense of his work, in which deep structures of thought and feeling find material equivalents. Briggs’ series Cell Personae exemplifies this approach. It is his personal response to the “other” pandemic raging through America – the mass incarceration of Black people, which is itself an act of grand-scale criminality. The works amount to a firm, resolved protest against this ongoing tragedy. Each is rectilinear, evoking the confining dimensions of a jail cell, and contains within it a nest of serpentine forms. They could be taken as symbolizing the psychic energy of imprisoned individuals - complex thoughts and emotional torment - or perhaps, more optimistically, the inevitability of eventual change. The works are remarkable for re-scripting the basic vocabulary of ceramics (slab construction and coils); Briggs brings to these familiar techniques a wholly new, compressed and clear meaning, of great relevance in this year of reckoning with issues of race in America.

Paul S. Briggs [American, b. 1963] Cell Personae, 2019 Stoneware clay 25 elements 9 x 6 x 5 inches each 23 x 15 x 13 cm each

Estudio Campana The creative journey of Humberto and Fernando Campana has taken them deep into the realms of psychology and culture; they seem to mine ever richer seams as the years go by. The brothers – whose beloved Brazil has been hit hard by the pandemic – have been separated even from one another this year, and certainly cut off from their usual extended network of craft workshops. Their recent Hybridism series, with its tumultuous, dystopian forms, resonates powerfully in this moment of disruption. The pandemic also led to the temporary closure (on its opening day) of their triumphant retrospective exhibition, at the MAM (Museu de Arte Moderna) in Rio de Janiero. Called 35 Revolutions – one per year of their studio’s operation – the exhibition is now open to the public again, extended through January.

Its ambitious scenography, which recapitulates aspects of Brazil’s natural environment, is populated with a hugely diverse range of the brothers’ work. Several of these idioms are also represented in What Would Have Been, including examples from the Cangaço series – inspired by the dashing attire of nineteenth-century bandits – and from the Campanas’ longstanding conservancy collaboration centered on of skin of the Pirarucu, a huge primordial fish of the Amazon. This creature’s presence here (indexed in cast aluminum), at a time of transient upheaval, helpfully reorients us to deep continuities – the flow of the river, and the communities that make their lives along it.

Fernando and Humberto Campana [Brazilian, b. 1961,1953] Bolotas Armchair (Bicolor), 2018 Sheep’s wool and Ipê wood 41.25 x 43.25 x 33.5 inches 105 x 110 x 85 cm Edition of 8

Fernando and Humberto Campana [Brazilian, b. 1961,1953] Bolotas Armchair (Multicolor), 2018 Sheep’s wool and Ipê wood 41.25 x 43.25 x 33.5 inches 105 x 110 x 85 cm Edition of 8

Fernando and Humberto Campana [Brazilian, b. 1961,1953] Cangaรงo Bookshelf, 2015 Wood structure covered with handcrafted leather produced by Espedito Seleiro 76.5 x 79 x 21.25 inches 194 x 200 x 54 cm Edition of 25

Fitas Buffet Drawing, 2012

Fernando and Humberto Campana [Brazilian, b. 1961,1953] Fitas Buffet, 2012 Stainless steel 27.5 x 63 x 15.75 inches 70 x 160 x 40 cm Edition of 8

Fernando and Humberto Campana [Brazilian, b. 1961,1953] Noah Bench, 2017 Cast bronze, woven fabric 41.25 x 101 x 42 inches 105 x 256.5 x 107 cm Edition of 8

Fernando and Humberto Campana [Brazilian, b. 1961,1953] Noah Table Candleholder, 2019 Cast bronze 9 x 7 x 7 inches 23 x 18 x 18 cm Edition of 16

“The Pirarucu Collection uses the skin of the Pirarucu, the world’s largest fresh water fish native to the Brazilian Amazon. This fish is an important food and economic resource for the local economy that provides income for the native indigenous community and allows them to continue living in their natural forest habitat. The fishery is managed in a sustainable way, controlled by NGOs dedicated to the preservation of the species. For some of the pieces in this collection, we created a hybrid between two key elements of Brazilian culture: Pirarucu skin and bamboo.” - Estudio Campana

Fernando and Humberto Campana [Brazilian, b. 1961,1953] Pirarucu Buffet, 2017 Cast aluminum 35.5 x 79.25 x 19.75 inches 90 x 201.5 x 50 cm Edition of 8

Fernando and Humberto Campana [Brazilian, b. 1961,1953] Racket and Detonado Chair, 2014 Brass structure weaved in transparent nylon with patchwork of reclaimed Thonet straws 37.5 x 37.5 x 27.5 inches 95 x 95 x 70 cm Edition of 8

Fernando and Humberto Campana [Brazilian, b. 1961,1953] Wave Buffet, 2016 Brushed stainless steel, felt, EVA 27.5 x 78.75 x 15.75 inches 70 x 200 x 40 cm Edition of 8

Campana Brothers: 35 Revolutions Museu de Arta Moderna (MAM Rio), 2020

Wendell Castle It is uplifting to think about Wendell Castle, now, two years after his passing. He was a man who seemed to thrive on setbacks and unanticipated swerves; who saw tight corners as springboards; who made endless hard work seem like the greatest joy. One of the works shown in What Would Have Been says it all: a mirror entitled Facing the Unfamiliar. It’s a brilliant title, suggesting that every glance at oneself can be a new encounter. And a brilliant composition, too. The snaking, undulating form seems to respond just slightly to gravity, in its downward thrust, yet has the classic Castle exuberance, his typical lightness of touch. These contours have precursors in his oeuvre, stretching back to the sinuous curvatures of his experimental 1960s masterworks, as well as his celebrated Star Cabinets of the mid 1990s, and of course the climactic carved forms of his late career, of which No Slouch, also included here, is a prime example. (It’s also a funny and affecting cultural reference, an unusual note in his work.) How good it would be, this year, to be able to speak with Castle again; to hear his calm, hopeful voice. Yet he is still present through is work – which embodies so much of what makes life worth living.

Wendell Castle [American, 1932-2018] No Slouch, 2013 Stained ash 30 x 76 x 27 inches 76 x 193 x 69 cm Edition 1 of 8

Triad Chair Drawing, 2007

Wendell Castle [American, 1932-2018] Triad Chair, 2006 Fiberglass with silver leaf 37 x 36 x 34 inches 94 x 91.4 x 86.4 cm Edition of 8

Byung Hoon Choi Some artists work to rhythms so profound, so sustained, that even the dramatic upheavals of 2020 feel like a surface effect in comparison. Byung Hoon Choi is one such artist. A master sculptor, he does operate within a national tradition – and indeed, has been an educator of tremendous significance in South Korea – but also occupies a global and transhistorical frame of reference. As the French museum director Olivier Gabet has observed, his work implies “a universal history of modernity, a history which creates a linkage between the most removed of times and geographies.” The objects included here, from the series afterimage of beginning, evoke this grand temporal scale through restrained but decisive gestures. Each is a moment of yin/yang encounter between the rough and the smooth, the natural and the human-made, the ancientness of stones and the presentness of our own actions. Choi has recently completed a major trio of sculptures for The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which mark one entrance to its newly expanded architecture. It is amazing to think that, even when the world is closed down, stones quarried in Indonesia, shaped in Korea, and destined for Texas have continued on their journey, paying our troubles no mind.

Byung Hoon Choi [Korean, b. 1952] Scholar’s Way, 2018 Basalt Scholar’s Way 1: 119.25 x 32.25 x 29.25 inches; 303 x 80 x 78 cm Scholar’s Way 2: 118.5 x 31.5 x 27.5 inches; 301 x 80 x 70 cm Scholar’s Way 3: 119.25 x 32.25 x 29.25 inches; 303 x 82 x 74 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2020

Scholar’s Way Drawings, 2018

Scholar’s Way Model, 2018

Scholar’s Way in Production, 2018

Byung Hoon Choi [Korean, b. 1952] afterimage of beginning 018-511, 2018 White marble, natural stone 19.25 x 31 x 19.5 inches 49 x 79 x 50 cm

Byung Hoon Choi [Korean, b. 1952] afterimage of beginning 019-517, 2019 Black granite, bubinga 10 x 65 x 47.25 inches 25 x 165 x 120 cm

Byung Hoon Choi [Korean, b. 1952] afterimage of beginning 020-535, 2020 Basalt 25.25 x 98.5 x 39.5 inches 64 x 250 x 100 cm

Paul Cocksedge Push typifies Paul Cocksedge’s extraordinary feats of conception and making. As an image, it could not be clearer or more immediate: a conical form pushed into a vertical slab. The work could be - in fact, was - modeled in seconds with a couple of pieces of paper. But as a material fact, it is astonishing to the point of incomprehensibility. How could such thin stainless steel cantilever so dramatically into space, while creating enough strength to support a person in an unsurpassably dramatic seating position? Push, which builds on the Poised series previously shown at Friedman Benda, would have been featured at the gallery this autumn in a solo show, had it not been for the pandemic. A new moment for it, along with other works within the same typology, will be shown at Friedman Benda in March 2021 – the additional time affording Cocksedge the chance to further consider and refine this body of work.

Paul Cocksedge [British, B. 1978] Push, 2019 Stainless steel, cast concrete 82.75 x 57.75 x 66.5 inches 210 x 147 x 169 cm

Carmen D’Apollonio The arrival of a new artist sometimes tells you a lot about where a gallery is going. One of the new stars in Friedman Benda’s firmament is Carmen D’Apollonio, whose ceramics would have been featured prominently this year in fair presentations – they will be the subject of an exhibition next year. A designer only in the loosest sense of the term, her presence in Friedman Benda’s program indicates an ongoing cross-pollination of disciplinary areas, and in particular, an open-mindedness with regard to the two parallel trajectories of craft and sculpture. D’Apollonio, who is self-taught in the ceramic medium, creates disjunctive, tumbling forms, in which discrete images emerge from an amorphous yet energetic mass. This year was originally to have been the moment for unveiling her new direction, which is figurative, but hardly in a straightforward way. Where the body is seen, in these new works, it is beyond gender or other normative identities, as if seen through the eyes of a Cubist sculptor and with the mind of a poet. Her titles, which range from the comic to the plaintive, offer narrative fragments entirely in tune with these suggestive, open-ended forms. In combination with the art historical resonance of D’Apollonio’s compositions, they evoke the atmosphere of a time half-remembered.

Carmen D’Apollonio [Swiss, b. 1973] Let me try again, 2020 Bronze, linen 84 x 18 x 18 inches 213.4 x 45.7 x 45.7 cm

Carmen D’Apollonio [Swiss, b. 1973] One More Time, 2019 Ceramic, cotton 45 x 12 x 12 inches 114.3 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Andile Dyalvane Many artists are both storytellers and healers, in a sense. But for Andile Dyalvane, these two vocations are absolutely central to his life and work. Both roles come across powerfully in his new seating forms, which are partly inspired by stools that members of his community sit on during his own healing ceremonies. The motifs that embellish each form are based on symbols that Dyalvane devised, initially by drawing in his sketchbooks: “symbols are visual tools harnessed to impart more effectively meanings within messages, code if you will, that aid stories.” This year, with the onset of the pandemic, he worked quietly in his studio to refine this language into nineteen projected works, under the title ‘iThongo’ (Ancestral Dreamscapes). They respond to the landscape, traditions, and spirituality handed down among the amaXhosa tribe in Ngobozana, the village where he was born and raised in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, though as always in his work, there is also a pronounced aspect of tough-minded urbanism, reflecting his fundamentally cosmopolitan outlook. As Dyalvane writes, “These stools, taking inspiration from both memories and African artefacts are low, close to earth - the ground revered as an ancient portal for our ancestral communion.”

iThongo Yalezo Symbols, 2020

eNtshonalanga (Sunset) Model, 2020

Andile Dyalvane [South African, b. 1978] eNtshonalanga (Sunset), 2020 Partially glazed terracotta clay 27.5 x 19.75 x 25.5 inches 70 x 50 x 65 cm

Umtshayelo (Broom) Model, 2020

Andile Dyalvane [South African, b. 1978] Umtshayelo (Broom), 2020 Partially glazed terracotta clay 32.25 x 23.5 x 25.5 inches 82 x 60 x 65 cm

uTyani (Vegetation) Model, 2020

Andile Dyalvane [South African, b. 1978] uTyani (Vegetation), 2020 Partially glazed terracotta clay 38.25 x 27.5 x 25.5 inches 97 x 70 x 65 cm

Najla El Zein Najla El Zein had quite a year in 2019. Following the exhibition of her ambitious seating sculpture Seduction, Pair 01 on view at the Dallas Museum of Art (it was subsequently acquired there), she presented works from that series as well as two others developed in parallel at her Friedman Benda exhibition, Transition. Then she moved from Beirut – where she was born, and had spent the past several years – to Amsterdam. But there was no let-up to her creative proliferation.

El Zein began generating ideas for public commissions; new monumental works in the Seduction series were also underway, including the full-scale version of Pair 06, whose prototype is included here. (The seating sculpture has now been realized, but not yet seen outside of its first display at Amman Design Week, in Jordan.) 2020 has been a very different time. In the midst of global disruption, a horrendous and destructive explosion took place in the heart of Beirut, where El Zein retains extensive personal ties. In the face of these tragedies, her works’ communicative power has undiminished resonance, conveying not just the complexity but also the fundamental importance of human connection.

Najla El Zein [Lebanese, French b. 1983] Fragmented Pillar, 08, 2018 Plaster sand 86.75 x 22 x 22 inches 220 x 56 x 56 cm Edition of 5

Fragmented Pillar, 10, 2018 Plaster sand 85 x 17 x 17 inches 216 x 43 x 43 cm Edition of 5

Najla El Zein [Lebanese, French b. 1983] Seduction, Pair 06, 2019 Iranian red travertine 27.5 x 62.5 x 18.75 inches 70 x 159 x 47.5 cm Edition of 8

KAWS x Campana Few design projects had more airtime in 2019 than the collaboration between Kaws and Campana Brothers.

In addition to a tremendous volume of social media interest, the chairs were shown at the Pizzuti Collection in Columbus, also in 2019, and this year meant to be included both in the Campanas’ retrospective at MAM Rio (initially postponed, but now open) and KAWS’ exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, a project that unfortunately had to be canceled. It’s a shame, as this parallel to the exhibition in Brazil would have made for an intriguing shared moment across the southern hemisphere. Fortunately, the collaboration is certain to continue attracting interest. It is a perfect collision of two very different artistic trajectories, but with much in common between them, notably, an ability to fuse accessible surface qualities with trenchant cultural commentary. They offer a pleasure akin to two veteran musicians taking the stage, jamming together, and finding perfect harmony.

KAWS and Estudio Campana KAWS: Companion Chair (Brown) and KAWS: Companion Chair (Grey), 2019 Plush toys, stainless steel, Cumaru wood 36 x 52 x 41 inches 91.5 x 132 x 104 cm Edition of 25

KAWS and Estudio Campana KAWS: Gang and KAWS: Monster, 2019 Plush toys, stainless steel, Cumaru wood 36 x 52 x 41 inches 91.5 x 132 x 104 cm Edition of 25

Front Design The groundbreaking digital furniture series Sketch, by Swedish design trio Front, looks ever more prescient as time goes on. Even when brand new, in 2005, it was recognized as a bellwether: the simple promise of drawing a few lines in space, and having them fully materialized in three dimensions, without any further human intervention, only the operations of code working itself through to conclusion. The objects felt like a seductive foretaste of things to come.

We haven’t quite reached the ease of production this scenario implies, but every year gets us a little closer, thanks to the continual development of rapid prototyping technology. Meanwhile, Sketch itself has become a classic of sorts - one of the first really persuasive aesthetic implementations of digital tooling. This year, the unique black version of the Sketch chair included here was meant to be exhibited in an exhibition organized by the Vitra Design Museum.

Front Design [Swedish, est. 2004] Materialized Sketch of a Round-Back Chair (Black), 2005 Thermoplastic powder 30.08 x 18.54 x 19.29 inches 76.4 x 47.1 x 49 cm

Bruno Gambone Few ceramic artists working today have a more long-established presence in the discipline than Bruno Gambone.

Born in 1936, he was trained by his father Guido – a towering figure in his own right, in the story of midcentury Italian ceramics – and then freed himself from that dominant influence, working through numerous idioms over the course of his own long career. Though he continued to express himself using ceramics, his intellectual and aesthetic context has principally been contemporaneous fine art – the work of the Arte Povera group, of Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi. He has created in clay what his contemporaries have tried to paint. Then too, as for so many Italian modernists, the backdrop of ancient civilizations has been vital for him, particularly the elegant and mysterious artifacts of the Etruscans. The presentation of his work here includes a signally important, monumental, multiple-neck vase from the 1960s; and several examples of his collage-like plates, which attest to the breadth and sophistication of his vocabulary.

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Monumental Vase, c. 1960s Glazed stoneware 37 x 25 x 25 inches 94 x 63.5 x 63.5 cm

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Untitled, 1970-1981 Stoneware 23 x 23 x 2.5 inches 58.4 x 58.4 x 6.4 cm

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Untitled, 2011 Stoneware 16 x 15.25 x 3 inches 40.6 x 38.7 x 7.6 cm

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Untitled, 2003 Stoneware 15.5 x 15.25 x 1.5 inches 39.4 x 38.7 x 3.8 cm

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Untitled, 2011 Stoneware 15.5 x 15.5 x 1.25 inches 39.4 x 39.4 x 3.2 cm

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Untitled, c. 1990 Stoneware 15 x 15.5 x 2 inches 38.1 x 39.4 x 5.1 cm

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Untitled, 1975-1980 Stoneware 23 x 23 x 3.25 inches 58.4 x 58.4 x 8.3 cm

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Untitled, c. 1990’s Stoneware 18 x 7 x 5 inches 45.7 x 17.8 x 12.7 cm

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Untitled, c. 1990’s Stoneware 20.25 x 6.5 x 4.5 inches 51.4 x 16.5 x 11.4 cm

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Untitled, c. 1990’s Stoneware 22.75 x 14.5 x 5 inches 57.8 x 36.8 x 12.7 cm

Bruno Gambone [Italian, b. 1936] Untitled, 2018 Stoneware 22.75 x 12.75 x 4.75 inches 57.8 x 32.4 x 12.1 cm

gt2P (Great Things to People) The Chilean collective gt2P should have had a banner year in 2020, with a planned solo presentation at Design Miami/ Basel, and continuing research into their distinctive repertoire of parametric design. With the onset of the lockdown, not only was the exhibition canceled, but the team could not even get into their own studio for many months. It’s been a tough blow for a practice still in its formative years, and which relies so completely on collective thinking and action. There is little doubt that this will be only a temporary setback, though, for since bursting on to the international scene, they have gone from strength to strength. The monolithic furniture shown here, from their innovative Remolten series, is a particularly amazing achievement, the payoff of years of investigation into kiln-firing Chilean lava on to a stoneware armature. They are also bringing new formal vocabularies to bear on this materiality, in particularly the idea of “self-organization,� drawn from the natural behavior of biological cells.

gt2P (Great Things to People) Less CPP N2: Wall Light 6C, 2016 Porcelain, volcanic lava rock, LED system, brass 82 x 56 x 7 inches 208 x 142 x 18 cm Edition of 8

gt2P (Great Things to People) Remolten N1: Stools, 2016-2019 Stoneware structure, volcanic lava Dimensions variable

gt2P (Great Things to People) Remolten N1: Revolution Coffee Table, Quitralco, Osorno Volcano, October 19th, 2018 Stoneware structure, volcanic lava 10.25 x 28.25 x 28.25 inches 26 x 72 x 72 cm

gt2P (Great Things to People) Suple Connecting Form: Manufactured Landscapes Bench, 2018 Bronze, stainless steel, volcanic rock 60 x 160 x 96 inches 152 x 406 x 244 cm Edition of 3

Permanent Collection Design Museum, London

gt2P (Great Things to People) Remolten N1: Monolita Chair 15, Quitralco, Osorno Volcano, April 23rd, 2019 Stoneware structure, volcanic lava 33 x 17.75 x 23.5 inches 84 x 45 x 60 cm

gt2P (Great Things to People) Remolten N2: Self Organization Mirror, Osorno Volcano, December 13th, 2019 Volcanic lava, acid-treated mirror 31.5 x 15.75 x 2 inches 80 x 40 x 5 cm

gt2P (Great Things to People) Remolten N1: Shelf/ Screen 10, 2 Components, Mahuanco, Llaima Volcano, January 19th, 2020 Stoneware structure, volcanic lava 63 x 19 x 15 inches 160 x 48 x 38 cm

gt2P (Great Things to People) Remolten N1: Side Table 15, Drawer, Quitralco, Llaima Volcano, January 15th, 2020 Stoneware structure, volcanic lava 35 x 23.5 x 19.25 inches 89 x 60 x 49 cm

Rendering for Design Miami/ Basel, 2020

Florian Idenburg (SO - IL) The work of Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu – partner-founders of the New York architecture and design practice SO – IL, or Solid Objectives – is distinguished by its material invention and structural integrity. Their body of completed projects, which includes museums and galleries, public housing, and residential commissions – has now enlarged to take in furniture as well. Their primary foray into the discipline is Frame, an evolving series constructed using welded steel and chain mesh, industrial materials worked by hand. Not so much conventional objects as free drawings in space, they reflect SO – IL’s dedication to flexible, conversational space, at any scale. They are counterintuitive, barely even recognizable as seating, yet in fact they beautifully condense architectural ideas to human scale. Public sites in miniature, they even model the give and take that characterizes successful social structures, as sitting on any one part will shift the tension in the rest of the surface. This year, after considerable delay due to the pandemic, SO – IL realized a major commission for the High Museum of Art entitled Murmuration, in which they enlarged the vocabulary of Frame back up to the size of architecture, echoing the trees surrounding the institution. The project is a powerful demonstration of the principle animating all of Idenburg and Liu’s work: that ideas can retain their integrity across spaces, scales, and sites, without limitation.

Florian Idenburg (SO – IL) [Dutch, b. 1975] frame 04, 2019 Stainless steel 39 x 63 x 54.5 inches 99 x 160 x 138 cm

Florian Idenburg (SO – IL) [Dutch, b. 1975] frame 05, 2019 Stainless steel 31.5 x 85 x 44 inches 80 x 215.9 x 111.8 cm

Rendering for Murmuration, 2020

Florian Idenburg (SO – IL) [Dutch, b. 1975] Murmuration, 2020 High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2020

Atlanta’s singular cityscape is celebrated for its abundance of trees. Murmuration,​a temporary installation for the High Museum of Art, responds directly to the architecture of its Renzo Piano-designed Piazza. Using the lens of bird migrations, it reacts to Atlanta’s relationship with the natural world. The sculptural arrangement echoes the form of a bird murmuration, a flock of birds, momentarily suspended in midair.​​The canopy is strewn with ample birdfeeders, seating perches, and other playful elements to encourage interaction, observation, and awareness. The experience is designed to spur conversations around biodiversity, extinction, and cohabitation.” - Florian Idenburg

Misha Kahn Covid-19 came to New York City only a short time after Misha Kahn’s Soft Bodies, Hard Spaces opened at Friedman Benda. Though forced to close early, the exhibition (Kahn’s third solo show at the gallery) still registered as the most impressive outing yet by this wildly imaginative young creator. As has become customary with him, it included several different bodies of work, all shown cheek by jowl, a boisterous family gathering. Kahn employs an “everything-upto-and-quite-possibly-including the kitchen sink” approach to production; a comprehensive material list for his show would likely run to several pages, all wrung into shape through self-invented and adapted processes, ranging from virtual reality renderings to artisanal basketweaving. Most importantly, the exhibition showcased the continuing vitality of his restlessly experimental, intuitive way around objects. His incredible Reception Desk for the Unknown exemplifies his approach: to make it, he infused the noble material of cast bronze with the squiggling, wriggling, lexicon of digital rendering. If a Museum of 2020 is ever established to take the measure of this strange moment in history, this desk should be placed so as to greet the visitors: right out front, where Kahn feels most at home.

Misha Kahn [American, b. 1989] On the Occasion of the Crumbling of Our Empire, 2017 Aluminum, transparent urethane color coating 78 x 52 x 7 inches 198.1 x 132.1 x 17.8 cm Edition of 8

Misha Kahn [American, b. 1989] Al Dente, 2019 Aluminum 35 x 21 x 21 inches 89 x 53 x 53 cm Edition of 8

Misha Kahn [American, b. 1989] The Slippery Feel of Inevitability, 2016 Hand carded, spun and dyed mohair and poly-cotton 106.5 x 146.5 inches 270.5 x 372.1 cm Edition of 3

Misha Kahn [American, b. 1989] A Little Help Across the Sidewalk Please, 2020 Rose quartz, glass, wool 26 x 18.5 x 18.5 inches 66 x 47 x 47 cm

Misha Kahn [American, b. 1989] Reception Desk for the Unknown, 2020 Bronze 37.5 x 83 x 25.5 inches 95.3 x 210.8 x 64.8 cm

Misha Kahn [American, b. 1989] Slide to the Left, 2020 Stainless steel, concrete, glass, fiberglass, ceramic, bamboo, wool 79 x 25 x 21 inches 201 x 63.5 x 53 cm

Misha Kahn [American, b. 1989] Slide to the Right, 2019 Stainless steel, copper, bronze, aluminum, concrete, glass, fiberglass, ceramic 73 x 37 x 37 inches 185.4 x 94 x 94 cm

Drawings for Soft Bodies Hard Spaces, 2020

Misha Kahn: Soft Bodies Hard Spaces Friedman Benda, New York, 2020

Shiro Kuramata Back in 1986, Shiro Kuramata’s Glass Chair looked pretty radical; it still does today. As minimal an object as design history has to offer (and containing within it a historical allusion to the Dutch master Gerrit Rietveld), it reflects its maker’s ethereal sensibility and mastery of unexpected materials, while also offering itself up as a riddle: a chair that’s nearly not there, all the more powerful as it evades our view. Though he died in 1991, Kuramata has been a presiding spirit (in the ghostly sense of the term) within Friedman Benda’s program since the gallery’s founding.

Among the things lost over the course of this year – and purposefully reclaimed in What Would Have Been – is the suggestive adjacency between various artists, as they would have been presented in fairs and other exhibitions. In March 2020, just as the coronavirus was arriving to Europe, Kuramata’s work was showcased at TEFAF in Maastricht, alongside that of Gaetano Pesce and Ettore Sottsass. The impact of this presentation, juxtaposing three of the most influential designers of the past fifty years. It was a momentous gathering, which exposed fascinating contrasts and comparisons among the trio of protagonists. The conversations they had with one another at a distance now run riot across all of design. Between them, these three protagonists mapped almost the whole terrain that contemporary practices occupy. These explorations may have been interrupted this year, but they will long continue.

Shiro Kuramata [Japanese, 1934-1991] Glass Chair, 1976 Glass 34.65 x 35.43 x 23.62 inches 88 x 90 x 60 cm Edition of 40

Interior of Soseikan House (1974-75), Takarazuka, Hyogo, Japan, designed 1967 by Tadao Ando.

Published in Yukio Futagawa and Kenneth Frampton, Tadao Ando (GA Architect Series No. 8), Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1987, p. 35.

Shiro Kuramata [Japanese, 1934-1991] Set of four dining chairs from the Soseikan House (1974-75), Takarazuka, Hyogo, Japan, 1975-1976 Oak and oak veneered wood Each: 36.25 x 19.5 x 19.5 inches 92.1 x 49.5 x 49.5 cm

Joris Laarman One of the most visionary technologist in design today, Joris Laarman has cut a broad swathe through the discipline’s recent history, generating whole systems of production one after another, leaving an impressive number of aesthetic masterworks in his wake. The four objects included in What Would Have Been, as various as they are, only hint at the scope of his innovations. Particularly notable is the most recent work, Space Exchanger, an outgrowth of his celebrated MX3D technology. This self-developed tooling system allows for the depositing of metal in free space – essentially, a kind of unbounded 3D printing. So broad are its potential applications that Laarman founded a separate company to explore its possibilities. He occasionally incorporates discoveries made in that commercial context into his studio work, reframing the technology as an autonomous proposition (a strategy with a significant lineage, as he notes, stretching all the way back to the 1934 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Machine Art). Both technically and conceptually, the bronze Space Exchanger derives inspiration from functional heat exchange units, which feature similar undulating, connected fins. Such forms could never be made at this scale or refinement with conventional techniques such as casting, or forming from sheets. Laarman introduces further visual dynamism through a two-tone finish, with one face of the screen oxidized black, the other brushed to reveal the inherent color of the metal. Like all of his works, it is at once a deeply expressive object, which offers all the pleasures of any great sculpture from the Baroque era to our own; and also a demonstration of what can be done, out at this leading edge of the possible: “a frozen moment in the experiments we do.”

Joris Laarman [Dutch, b. 1979] Bone Rocker, 2008 Cast black marble resin 29.5 x 37.5 x 34.5 inches 74.9 x 95.3 x 87.6 cm Edition of 12

Joris Laarman [Dutch, b. 1979] Light Matter, 2013 White marble resin 13.5 x 57.5 x 40.25 inches 34 x 146 x 102 cm Edition of 20

Joris Laarman [Dutch, b. 1979] Maker Chair (Diagonal Resin and Wood), 2014 Resin and walnut 30.75 x 23.75 x 25.5 inches 78 x 60 x 65 cm Edition of 16

Joris Laarman [Dutch, b. 1979] Maker Table (Hexagon), 2014 Oak 30.25 x 135.75 x 51.25 inches 77 x 345 x 130 cm Edition of 3

Joris Laarman [Dutch, b. 1979] Space Exchanger, 2020 3d printed bronze 102.25 x 94.5 x 23.5 inches 260 x 240 x 60 cm Edition of 3

John Mason The world of sculpture lost one of its giants in 2019, with the passing of John Mason. The career of this personally modest but artistically formidable man began in the white heat of the 1950s Los Angeles art scene. Working within a circle of sculptors and painters anchored in the groundbreaking Ferus Gallery, Mason developed a series of abstract idioms that revolutionized his own medium of ceramics. The interplay of basic forces – lateral and vertical movement, the assertion and transcendence of gravity, and eventually, complex vectors of torque and twist – was his central preoccupation. The works shown here, made more than fifty years apart, make for a fascinating pairing. The important untitled sculpture from 1958 demonstrates his architectural leanings, and ability to compose dynamic forms through the accretion and intersection of planar slabs. The 2015 work deploys a similar material lexicon to wholly different effect, creating the impression of a figure poised in space.

John Mason [American, 1927-2019] Four Stack Figure, Eggshell, 2015 Ceramic 58.5 x 17 x 17 inches 148.5 x 43 x 43 cm

John Mason [American, 1927-2019] Monumental Wall Sculpture, 1958 Ceramic 61 x 33 x 10 inches 155 x 84 x 25.5 cm

John Mason [American, 1927-2019] Untitled, 1958 Ceramic 28 x 17 x 14 inches 74.9 x 43.2 x 35.6 cm

Raphael Navot Design is a huge cultural arena, and Friedman Benda’s program only covers a certain territory within it: avant garde practices that prioritize conceptual and material experimentation. For this reason, the gallery has done relatively little in the domain of luxury production, in which value is derived primarily from fine materials and exquisite craftsmanship.

Yet design does not carve cleanly into parts; everywhere you look there are liminal figures, whose contributions come in part from their passage through seemingly distinct categories. The Israeli-born, Paris-based Raphael Navot is one of these shape-shifters. He graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2003 – when the school was at the peak of its success as a talent factory for the field – and has since then charted an independent pathway, free of the narrow imperatives of the luxury sector while making use of its means, emulating its subtle nuances of texture, form, palette, and material. The sofa seen here, the premier example shown from his new Acrostic series, is a particular marvel: an asymmetrical, cloudlike composition that seemingly can be rearranged at will.

Raphael Navot [Israeli, b. 1977] Acrostic (Overlay), 2020 Cashmere, silk, oak 33 x 103.25 x 40.25 inches 84 x 262 x 102 cm Edition of 8

Raphael Navot [Israeli, b. 1977] Aleatoric A, 2019 Oxidized oak, m 36 x 110 x 25.25 inches 91.5 x 279 x 64 cm Edition of 8

Raphael Navot [Israeli, b. 1977] Senza Misura, 2020 Oak 29.5 x 114.25 x 43.25 inches 75 x 290 x 110 cm Edition of 8

nendo Watercolour, by Oki Sato’s celebrated Japanese design firm nendo, was premiered by Friedman Benda at Design Miami/ Basel in 2018. Each piece in the collection is conceived as an intersection of horizontal ellipses, which hover on slim legs. Lightness of touch and perfection of execution – characteristic of all nendo’s work – combine to ethereal and transcendent effect. In some of the designs, chair forms nestle into tables; in others, elliptical planes fold into angles, articulating functional forms. Blue is used to mark the zones where shadow would fall under strong light, or in use. Yet the works are also Color Field abstractions; nendo is pursuing a new interest in painterly effects, the way that pigment blooms into imagery. Though the soft blue and white palette evokes multiple sources, the dominant impression is that of a pure celestial space. The works are like pieces of the sky brought to earth, and they look better than ever seen from lockdown, when the heavens above have taken on unusual importance, one of our few constantly changing views. An example from the series was shown this year in the Design Museum Gent’s Kleureyck, an innovative exhibition exploring the use of color in design.

nendo [Established, Tokyo, 2002] Watercolour group, 2018 Hand-painted steel Dimensions variable Edition of 3

Kleureyck: Van Eyck’s Colours in Design Design Museum Gent, 2020

Erez Nevi Pana As many have observed, Covid-19 may be only a foreshadowing of crises to come, as climate change and the depletion of natural resources continue to transform the planet. In theory (though rarely in practice), design should be one of the disciplines most suited to meet this challenge, and help avert the dystopian scenario of environmental collapse. Erez Nevi Pana is at the forefront of this thinking. By applying rigorous principles of sustainability to every aspect of his work – not only the objects he makes, but how he eats, lives, and travels – he gives us a glimpse of what may be required to truly maintain our ecological equilibrium. The work included here is from a series made in the Dead Sea, which (even in its name) seems the epitome of lifeless landscape. Nevi Pana subverts this expectation through an ingenious process in which loofah is built over an armature, the resulting construction then submerged in the salt-saturated seawater. The salt (at higher concentration than it should be naturally, due to mineral extraction operations in the region) gradually builds up into a baroque accretion, ornamental in appearance but entirely organic in its origin. This year, several of these objects were left submerged longer than intended, producing wholly new formations. Extracting a strange beauty from the most unpromising of circumstances, Nevi Pana gives us a symbol of how we might proceed.

Erez Nevi Pana [Israeli, b.1983] BB2020.APR.1, 2019 Salt crystallized loofah, wood and aluminum structure 29.5 x 23.5 x 23.5 inches 75 x 60 x 60 cm

Erez Nevi Pana [Israeli, b.1983] BB2020.APR.2, 2019 Salt crystallized loofah, wood and aluminum structure 30.75 x 23.5 x 23.5 inches 78 x 60 x 60 cm

Erez Nevi Pana [Israeli, b.1983] Crystalline, 2020 NGV Triennial National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2020

For it’s second Triennial, The National Gallery of Victoria has commissioned Crystalline, an exploratory sal structure. Going on view in December 2020, it’s the designer’s most ambitious work to date. With Crystalline, Nevi Pana examines a metamorphosis of basic raw material into a deliberate refined composition that imagines nature and its processes as a partner in the practice of building. This commission is his only manifestation of salt-based architecture to date, combining each of the techniques he has explored thus far in his work while proposing new and immediately applicable solutions for building in a more sustainable world.” - Jennifer Olshin

OrtaMiklos Over the past couple of years, even as Leo Orta and Viktor Miklos have maintained their identity as students at Design Academy Eindhoven, they have established themselves as one of the most exciting practices on the international design scene. At this early stage in their career, not so much straining at the leash as slipping out of it entirely, they have moved rapidly from unauthorized event occupations to officially sanctioned (but rambunctious) performances, installations, and videos. 2020 has seen them arrive like comets into Friedman Benda’s orbit. Their exhibition 6 Acts of Confinement, which took place right in the heart of the lockdown - it opened in late June - responded to the prevailing conditions of anxiety with youthful exuberance. The objects on view were assertive but open-ended, skillfully registering the overwhelming instability of the moment, as well blazing a trail to less obvious possibilities. With a team of collaborators, OrtaMiklos also created a pendant video work, Temple of Confinement, which takes place in a digital reconstruction of the Temple of Dendur - the ancient monument now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was of course unvisitable at the time. (Another unauthorized occupation.) Against this backdrop, they staged a virtual pageant that perfectly captures the psychological tenor of pandemic. Already, just a few months later, it feels like an important historic document.

OrtaMiklos [Established 2016] Melting Thonet, 2020 Steel, powder coating 34 x 31 x 26 inches 86.4 x 78.7 x 66 cm

OrtaMiklos [Established 2016] Dining Chairs, 2020 Fiberglass Dimensions variable

OrtaMiklos and JÄ nis Melderis Temple of Confinement, 2020 Video still

OrtaMiklos: 6 acts of confinement Friedman Benda, New York, 2020

Kleureyck: Van Eyck’s Colours in Design Design Museum Gent, 2020

Gaetano Pesce Of the founding generation of radical designers, none was more radical than Gaetano Pesce, and so he remains today. A provocateur from first to last, Pesce has been a geyser of ideas gushing unabated for over sixty years. Everyone working in speculative, figurative, experimental, conceptual, and process-based modes – and that covers most of the interesting currents in contemporary design today – owes something to him. Friedman Benda’s engagement with this mercurial yet canonical designer has focused particularly on the early chapter of his career in the late 1960s and early 1970s, notably in its exhibition Age of Contaminations and a shortened presentation this year at TEFAF (alongside Shiro Kuramata and Ettore Sottsass). A primary avenue for his insurgent energies at this time was Bracciodiferro (the name is taken from an Italian vulgarity, meaning roughly, ‘up yours’), an experimental wing that he instigated at Cassina. In theory, this was an in-house R&D laboratory for one of Italy’s dominant furniture companies. In practice, it was more like an elaborate exercise in self-criticism, with the serial, commercial and normative qualities of Cassina’s product lines all called into question. Pesce exploited the opportunity to create some of his most indelible work, including the Golgotha table and related Arca desks – whose bright red gel, dripping upwards, evokes the blood of Christ – and the sensational Moloch lamp, which towers overhead like the biblical monster from which it takes its name. Also included in What Would Have Been is one of Pesce’s “skins,” thin membranes of resin (a material he prefers both for its fluidity and its connotations of contemporary artificiality) which serve his purposes as an alternative form of expressive drawing.

Promotional image of Arca Desk, 1972, designed by Gaetano Pesce for Bracciodiferro, Genoa.

Published in “Ogni Esemplare, Numerato e Firmato�, Domus no. 530, January 1974, p. 48.

Gaetano Pesce [Italian, b. 1939] produced by Bracciodiferro Arca Desk, 1972 Wood bricks and gel coat 30 x 104 x 33 inches 76.2 x 264.2 x 83.8 cm 4 examples produced

Product Tag for Moloch Floor Lamp, 1971

Gaetano Pesce [Italian, b. 1939] produced by Bracciodiferro Prototype no. 000-F for Moloch floor lamp, 1971 Anodized aluminum, painted aluminum, aluminum, steel, painted steel, wood 90.5 x 122.75 x 33.75 inches 229.9 x 311.8 x 86 cm

Gaetano Pesce [Italian, b. 1939] Industrial Skin: Una Casa Per Me, 1991 Polyurethane 112 x 60 inches 284.5 x 152.4 cm

Raw-Edges Friedman Benda has recently undertaken a focused collaboration with the London-based design practice RawEdges (Yael Mer and Shay Akelay), concentrating on their celebrated Endgrain series. Made by the apparently (but not actually) simple technique of dyeing lengths of timber, gluing them up and reshaping them, the resulting objects are nonetheless dazzlingly complex in their surface patterns, which are made all the more satisfying by virtue of the nuanced palette. The potential of the collection was amply demonstrated in 2015, when Raw-Edges used it to reimagine the entire sculpture gallery at Chatsworth – one of England’s most important stately homes, open to the public as an arts venue. More recently, and working right through the period of quarantine, the duo has made a further (perhaps final) group of objects within the Endgrain series, one of which is featured here.

Raw-Edges (est. London 2006) Endgrain Bench, 2019 Dyed lumber 15 x 94.5 x 13.5 inches 38 x 240 x 34 cm

Samuel Ross “Life is about precision.” If Samuel Ross has a single motto, guiding all his various activities in design, fashion, and activism, this is it. His celebrated streetwear line A-Cold-Wall, launched in 2015, and his collaborations with Nike and Oakley, have established him as a generational standard-bearer, distinguished among other reasons for his sophisticated sourcing and handling of materials. Now Ross’ restless curiosity has brought him to create furniture, an outgrowth of his forays into sculptural objects. Signal, his new collection of seating forms, is aptly titled, marking the spot and pointing the way. Included in What Would Have Been is one of the first objects from the series, a chair with the low-slung profile of a racecar, executed in a striking palette of materials: rubberized hardwood with a steel plinth. Also here is Ross’s powerful Trauma chair, which bears witness to the Black Lives Matter protests that have swept across the world this year. With its black finish, tall proportions, and purposeful weight (25 kilograms), it is quite evidently an object to be reckoned with. Its high back and overall stance are inspired, in part, by historical African furniture – paying tribute to ancestry – while its detailing shades into the futuristic. Only a year into designing furniture, Ross has already used the discipline to create a monument for our moment: an object that asks not what would have been, but what will be.

“I’ve been fixated on developing a futurist language through furniture that communicates our diasporas past and future with intent to retain ancestral codes in relation to form, whilst reflecting a texture one must bear in the present to operate within such violently primitive, yet exceptional times. The core intention being to etch a future tense amplifying the atypical pattern of connection we share.” - Samuel Ross

Samuel Ross [British, b. 1989] SIGNAL-3, 2020 Steel, mdf 21.25 x 17.75 x 33.25 inches 54 x 44.7 x 84.2 cm Edition of 8

Samuel Ross [British, b. 1989] TRAUMA CHAIR, 2020 Fired OSB, burnished steel, molasses lacquer 54.25 x 18.25 x 19.5 inches 138 x 46.5 x 49.5 cm Edition of 8

Chris Schanck Since its inception, the Detroit-based practice of Chris Schanck has been the opposite of social distancing. As much cultural experiment as pragmatic workshop, his studio is an inspiring crossroads of various walks of life. Here on any given day, one could meet veterans of the local auto industry and its attendant businesses; a team of gorgeously turned-out, highly skilled women from the local Bangladeshi community; and art school graduates like Schanck himself. In 2020, of course, that wondrous mingling of people was temporarily disbanded. For Schanck – who had put himself in a position of responsibility for all these livelihoods – it was one of the sternest tests yet, in a career that has been full of them. In this year, when our thoughts have rightly been with front line workers, we may not easily remember that some artists fall into that category. And so it’s worth praising Schanck, here. Not only for the continuing expansion of his design language and narrative imagination (more on that in a minute), but simply for keeping his team together. Through a combination of workshop safety and distributed production, he’s done more than that: he’s kept the creative fires going. It helps that he has a goal to aim for: a retrospective exhibition that will be mounted at the Museum of Arts and Design next year, alongside several institutional commissions. In addition to a wide selection of his breakout body of work, Alufoil – several examples of which are also seen here – the MAD show will include his newer forays into figural work, a line of inquiry exemplified by Invasion (first shown in Friedman Benda’s 2018 group show Under the Night Sky). This work’s bold characterization and polychrome palette, starring an alien figure right out of a comic book, or perhaps period sci fi, points toward Schanck’s new horizons.

Chris Schanck [American, b. 1975] Cu, 2018 Steel, polystyrene, resin, aluminum foil 30 x 86 x 39 inches 76 x 218 x 99 cm

Chris Schanck [American, b. 1975] Bloom, 2018 Steel, polystyrene, nylon fiber, resin, aluminum foil 36 x 80 x 9 inches 91.5 x 203 x 23 cm

Chris Schanck [American, b. 1975] Grotto Console: Pomegranate, 2019 Steel, wood, polystyrene, polyurea, aluminum foil, resin 31 x 60 x 18 inches 79 x 152.5 x 46 cm

Chris Schanck [American, b. 1975] Grotto Mirror: Lavender II, 2019 Steel, polystyrene, polyurea, aluminum foil, glass, resin 73 x 54 x 7 inches 185 x 137 x 18 cm

Invasion Drawing, 2018

Chris Schanck [American, b. 1975] Invasion, 2018 Resin, steel, glass, polystyrene, nylon fiber, aluminum foil 45.5 x 52.5 x 26 inches 116 x 133.5 x 66 cm

Chris Schanck [American, b. 1975] Scrying Table III, 2018 Wood, polystyrene, polyurea, aluminum foil, resin 21 x 55 x 55 inches 53 x 140 x 140 cm

Kleureyck: Van Eyck’s Colours in Design Design Museum Gent, 2020

Mattias Sellden The present: a midpoint between past and future. On that definition, you won’t find a more contemporary figure than Mattias Sellden. This Swedish designer makes objects that resemble prehistoric stone dolmens, yet also feel like they’ve walked back into our moment from some distant, perhaps more well-adjusted tomorrow. A new arrival to Friedman Benda’s program – he will be featured in an upcoming group exhibition, in the planning now – Sellden (who was born in 1986) is also a representative figure of his generation, in that he trained as an industrial designer but has purposefully reoriented himself to rudimentary, expressive craft techniques.

Intuition is key to this work, from the initial phase of shape generation to the application of various handmade finishes. This instinct to be responsible for the means of one’s own production is very much in the air right now – and no wonder, given the number of supposedly robust systems that have broken down. In Sellden’s work, you can almost hear the whine of the table saw; pay close attention, and it sounds like a cry of freedom.

Mattias Sellden [Swedish, b. 1986] Untitled (Three Legs), 2020 Curly Birch, varnish pigment 14.5 x 14.5 x 9 inches 37 x 37 x 23 cm

Mattias Sellden [Swedish, b. 1986] Untitled (Two Legs), 2019 Curly Birch, varnish pigment 18.25 x 10 x 10.75 inches 46 x 25 x 27 cm

Adam Silverman Take any cross-section of work by Adam Silverman – indeed, take any single one of his pots – and it will strike you as a thickly embedded accumulation, built up over an extended duration, and containing a set of overlapping thought processes. Silverman can achieve this quality of compression thanks to the temporal nature of ceramics, in which instantaneous marks (drips, tears, dents, pools) are permanently fixed by firing. While embracing this self-archiving property of the medium, he also puts it through its paces by layering up multiple “events” of composition, each one partly obscuring earlier campaigns undertaken on the pot, but collectively producing a rich and unpredictable set of interactions. The resulting surface can be read like a historical manuscript, telling the story of itself. Silverman trained as an architect, and brings to his objects a robust sense of structure. He is also masterful enough with glaze that the pots bear comparison to abstract painting. But at the end of the day – of many days, in fact, laid end to end – they are a quintessential expression of ceramics, and what it can do.

Adam Silverman [American, b. 1963] Untitled, 2019 Stoneware 17.5 x 12 x 12 inches 44.5 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Adam Silverman [American, b. 1963] Untitled, 2019 Stoneware 30 x 11 x 10 inches 76.2 x 27.9 x 25.4 cm

Adam Silverman [American, b. 1963] Untitled, 2019 Stoneware 19 x 9 x 9 inches 48.3 x 22.9 x 22.9 cm

Common Ground in Production, 2020

Ettore Sottsass Every gallery is a stratigraphy. Some artists come to rest only for a brief moment, before moving on. Others are bedrock, staying for the length of their careers. A few are part of the core, and if you dig all the way down to Friedman Benda’s very foundations, you will find Ettore Sottsass. This great spirit of Italian design seems implicated in much of what the gallery does. Designers shown across What Would Have Been, from Gaetano Pesce to Guido Gambone, Faye Toogood to Adam Silverman, are made more legible through juxtaposition to Sottsass and his legacy. But of course, there’s nothing like encountering the work of the man himself. The generous selection shown here traces an arc of more than sixty years, from his formative abstract ceramics and furniture – including the important Commode Column, one of several totem-like case forms that he made in the early 1960s – through his radical years with Studio Alchimia, down to what are quite literally known as his Last Pieces, made in the year before his death.

These late objects may surprise, in their ample and nearly amorphous forms, not quite like anything Sottsass had made before. In retrospect, they seem like proof that this singularly generative creator prized fecundity to his last.

Study for vases, ca. 1955-1957 Published in Francesca Zanella, Ettore Sottsass: Catalogo ragionato dell’archivio 1922-1978 CSAC/Università di Parma, exh. cat., Milan: Silvana, 2017, p. 193.

Ettore Sottsass [Italian, 1917-2007] produced by Bitossi Lava (FF no. 116), 1957 Ceramic 12.75 x 6 x 6 inches 32 x 15 x 15 cm

Ettore Sottsass [Italian, 1917-2007] produced by Poltronova Wooden Frame, 1962 Wood and glass 38.25 x 11.75 x .75 inches 97.2 x 29.8 x 1.9 cm

Preparatory Sketch for Commode column, c. 1960

Ettore Sottsass [Italian, 1917-2007] produced by Renzo Brugola Commode column, c. 1960 Oak-veneered wood, oak, maple-veneered wood, painted maple-veneered wood, painted wood, painted steel, flat-head screws 86 x 19.75 x 19.75 inches 218.2 x 50 x 50.2 cm

Study for Alessandria D’Egitto Bookcase, 1980 Published in Peter Weiss, Ettore Sottasss Bau. Haus I, II, exh. cat., Bonen/Westfalen: Druckverlag Kettler, 2009, p. 59.

Ettore Sottsass [Italian, 1917-2007] produced by Studio Alchimia [Italian, est. 1976] Alessandria D’Egitto Bookcase, bau.haus II collection, 1980 Laminate, compressed wood, wood, checker-plate metal shelves 67.25 x 84.75 x 19.75 inches 170.5 x 215 x 50 cm

Faye Toogood Despite it all, 2020 has been one of the most productive moments in Faye Toogood’s career – which is saying a lot, given her previous prolific output as a fashion designer, object-maker, and orchestrator of interiors. The year’s activity, which includes a recent show at Friedman Benda and a forthcoming major installation at the National Gallery of Victoria (there should also have been a solo show in Basel, her first in mainland Europe, but it was canceled due to the crisis), is partly thanks to accrued momentum. For the past several years, Toogood has had a secret, experimental project underway. It is based on a simple idea, marvelously complex in the realization. Unveiled at last this autumn, under the title Assemblage 6: Unlearning, the project consists of quickly made maquettes in various inexpensive materials – card, tape, wire, clay – which have been exactingly and lovingly recreated at the scale of full functional objects.

The challenge, in this transmutation, was to preserve the gestural and material qualities of the original sketches, while achieving permanence and monumentality. The finished objects are hard to place: exercises in trompe l’oeil, expressionist sculptures, stylish furniture, and philosophical statements all at once. In this swirl of possible readings, one central meaning comes through loud and clear. It’s imperative to respect the spark of creativity, which sets all else alight.

Faye Toogood [British, b. 1977] Maquette 234 / Canvas and Foam Sofa, Rust, 2020 Primed, washed canvas, upholstery foam, fabric paint 27.5 x 134 x 53 inches 70 x 340 x 135 cm Edition of 8

Faye Toogood [British, b. 1977] Maquette 259 / Canvas and Foam Seat, Rust, 2020 Primed, washed canvas, upholstery foam, fabric paint 27.5 x 70.75 x 53 inches 70 x 180 x 135 cm Edition of 8

Faye Toogood [British, b. 1977] Maquette 248 / Canvas and Foam Daybed, Charcoal, 2020 Primed, washed canvas, upholstery foam, fabric paint 15.75 x 118 x 39.5 inches 40 x 300 x 100 cm Edition of 8

Faye Toogood [British, b. 1977] Maquette 143 / Clay Coffee Table, 2020 Cement composite 17.25 x 52.75 x 32 inches 44 x 134 x 81 cm Edition of 3

Faye Toogood [British, b. 1977] Maquette 085 / Masking Tape Light Tapestry, 2020 Wool, cotton 67.25 x 57 inches 171 x 145 cm

Faye Toogood [British, b. 1977] Maquette 263 / Unlearning Poem Tapestry, 2020 Wool, cotton 50.75 x 41.75 inches 129 x 106 cm

Rendering for Design Miami/ Basel, 2020

Faye Toogood: Assemblage 6 | Unlearning Friedman Benda, New York, 2020

Kleureyck: Van Eyck’s Colours in Design Design Museum Gent, 2020

NGV Triennial National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2020 “In a reimagining of the NGV’s 17th and 18th century galleries, devoted to Flemish, Dutch and British art, ‘Downtime’ is split into three discrete spaces alluding to the domestic interiors of the period. In Candlelight, the first thematic space, monumental Family Busts occupy center stage. Chiaroscuro lighting effects play off these powerful sculptures and project sensibility of the period portraits by Rembrandt and other Old Master painters. Lining the room, these portraits are framed by quickly-sketched wall drawings that establish a Surrealist architectural environment.” - Faye Toogood Studio

Toomas Toomepuu There’s a new direction happening in design right now. It involves exuberant objects, often cobbled together from old or miscellaneous materials, in an approach based in techniques of collage, and powered by DIY artisan techniques.

Despite these historic roots, it is legible as a response to digital culture, in both a positive and negative sense. On the one hand, this mix-and-match aesthetic is clearly in tune with the collisions-at-speed of digital renderings; on the other, its intense physicality offers a strong alternative to the frictionless, screen-based experience that has become so dominant in our lives (more so this year than ever). What Would Have Been arguably includes several designers that fit this description, but in terms of sheer combinatory energy, Toomas Toomepuu is probably the idiom’s clearest exponent. There is a maturity in his work, which belies both its initial frantic impression and his own relative youth; the melancholic undertow comes in part from his use of waste materials, which could be construed as a response to the daunting realities of climate change. These are objects for an overfull world, choking itself with stuff. But insofar as Toomepuu channels that sense of reckless abandon, his work takes on a genuine quality of optimism, even exuberance. If these objects are harbingers of doom, they also tell us that we might as well go out dancing.

Toomas Toomepuu [American, b. 1995] Rain Dance, 2019 Plywood, various hardwoods, glass, steel, silicone, foam and rubber 51 x 41 x 47 inches 129.5 x 104.1 x 119.4 cm

Jonathan Trayte Design can respond to a time of crisis in numerous ways. One of the most important is to provide respite for the body and mind alike. This potential function of objects usually seems to hover beneath critical notice: maybe it seems too obvious to mention, maybe it is too bound up with the problematic idea of luxury. But informality per se is neither self-evident, nor contradictory with intellectual intensity, or indeed, hard work. For proof of this, you need look no further than the work of Jonathan Trayte. Relaxed in the way that the best athletes are, his objects dispose themselves languidly in space, yet also have the effervescent fizz of the best pop art. There’s a good reason for this: Trayte is a deep student of what others might call “kitsch” (thrift store swag, down-market packaging and the like), which he sees not as visual noise, but an underexploited repository of cultural tropes. In this regard, his work is anything but casual – each object opens up a little window into the collective unconscious.

Jonathan Trayte [British, b. 1980] Atomic Double, 2020 Stainless steel, painted bronze, foam, polymer compound, pigments, nylon flock, horse hair, crushed glass, reinforced plastics, neon 35.5 x 39.25 x 7 inches 90 x 100 x 18 cm

Jonathan Trayte [British, b. 1980] Grass Green Settee, 2020 Powder-coated steel, stainless steel, bronze, marble, polymer compound, pigments, reinforced plastics, crushed glass, animal hide, upholstery, light-fitting 78.75 x 67 x 39.25 inches 200 x 170 x 100 cm

Jonathan Trayte [British, b. 1980] Hoh, 2019 Stainless steel, foam, polymer compound, pigments, nylon, light fitting 103.5 x 59 x 15.75 inches 263 x 150 x 40 cm

Jonathan Trayte [British, b. 1980] The Dream (Chandelier), 2020 Polished bronze, frosted glass, light fittings 65.75 x 9.75 x 39.25 inches 167 x 25 x 100 cm

Marcel Wanders Hardly anyone saw this year’s turbulence coming. But there are some events that, viewed in the rear-view mirror, seem almost eerie in their premonitory quality – as if they had somehow registered the first tremors of the calamity. That is certainly how Marcel Wanders’ 2016 exhibition at Friedman Benda, simply entitled Portraits, looks in retrospect. At the time, it came across as a rather introspective project, a deep dive into its creator’s ego. Wanders certainly viewed it in these personal terms, speaking of the exhibition as “expressing a more intimate and fragile side of myself… My personal duality is on display as I want both to shine, but also to reflect what is real as to darkness and brokenness.” As it turns out, that interior view feels remarkably pertinent in 2020. Wanders’ Dysmorphophobia mirrors, in particular, seem to have anticipated our moment, when so many people feel arbitrarily confined, and are obliged to see themselves through the distorting lens of their own digital devices. Yet Wanders’ “shine” is in these objects, too; and it’s worth remembering that his exhibition, even if it was to some extent a dark night of the soul, was also a ravishing experience. At a time when the world outside is unprecedentedly closed off to us, it’s helpful to be reminded that there’s also a vast world within.

Marcel Wanders [Dutch, b. 1963] Dysmorphophobia 3, 2015 Ultra clear glass, glass coating, stainless steel 78.75 x 51.25 inches 200 x 130 cm Edition of 5

James Wines In the 1980s, there were few more innovative figures in American design than James Wines, of the architectural group SITE (Sculpture In The Environment), and the fashion trendsetter Willi Smith. At first glance, they seem as different as two designers could be. Wines, who emerged from the conceptual and land art movements of previous decades, is a wily deconstructionist, with a humorous yet incisive critical turn of mind. Smith (who died in 1987) was a wildly successful entrepreneur, whose brand Williwear helped to define the very concept of streetwear, bringing ideas from New York’s Black community into the mainstream. What they shared was a deeply individual and creative response to the built and inhabited environment; and a knack for appropriating forms and motifs and making them, inimitably, their own. In this sense, their celebrated collaboration, centering on Williwear showrooms in New York and London (beginning in 1982) was actually a meeting of like minds. Both had their own reasons to bring the streetscape indoors, to an effect unlike anything either architecture or fashion had seen before, or since. This year, the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, presented a groundbreaking exhibition about Smith’s work, curated by Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, with exhibition design by Wines himself. The show was cruelly interrupted by the pandemic – closed the week that it opened – but it went on to an extended run, returning the story of WilliWear to the public eye.

This desk, an edition of the one that Wines originally designed for Smith’s use – a powerful compression of complex architectural ideas into a single object – extends this overdue reappraisal. It also marks the first manifestation of a dialogue with Friedman Benda, drawing on Wines’ capacious body of work to highlight its ongoing relevance.

Willi Smith’s Office, New York, 1982

Thaddeus Wolfe Thaddeus Wolfe has breathed new life into the ancient technique of mold-blown glass. He first assembles architectonic sculptural molds out of Styrofoam and other materials, then uses these to cast the glass, finally articulating the form with cutting and polishing. While in themselves more or less traditional, these techniques are entirely transformed in Wolfe’s hands, allowing him to achieve an deconstructivist repertoire, informed more by architecture and geology than contemporaneous work in his own medium. Recently, he has been undertaking some new experiments, including the combination of polychromatic glass with bronze and other metals. The relic quality of these objects – the sense that they may have landed in our moment from some distant past or future – puts them in conversation with other artists included in What Would Have Been, including Daniel Arsham and Chris Schanck. Even so, Wolfe’s vocabulary is all his own. It makes a fitting focal point for 2020, and an apt conclusion to this catalogue: emblems of the transformation of negative into positive.

Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Assemblage Sconces, 2014 Glass, bronze, brass and steel Each Sconce: 17 x 9 x 6 inches 43 x 23 x 15 cm

Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2020 Glass, bronze, brass 14 x 8 x 6 inches 35.6 x 20.3 x 15.2 cm

Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2020 Glass Left: 13.5 x 7.5 x 7.5 inches 34.3 x 19.1 x 19.1 cm Right: 18.5 x 12 x 10 inches 47 x 30.5 x 25.4 cm

Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2020 Glass 6 x 5.5 x 5 inches 15.2 x 14 x 12.7 cm

Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2020 Glass 10 x 7.5 x 7 inches 25.4 x 19.1 x 17.8 cm

Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2020 Glass Left: 10 x 9 x 9 inches 25.4 x 22.9 x 22.9 cm Right: 12.5 x 9 x 8 inches 31.8 x 22.9 x 20.3 cm

Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2019 Hand blown glass 19.5 x 7.5 x 7.5 inches 49.5 x 19.1 x 19.1 cm

Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2019 Hand blown glass, bronze, brass 20 x 7.5 x 8 inches 50.8 x 19.1 x 20.3 cm

Thaddeus Wolfe [American, b. 1979] Untitled, 2019 Hand blown glass, bronze, brass 20 x 8 x 9 inches 50.8 x 20.3 x 22.9 cm

Design in Dialogue March 2020 seems like a long time ago. As Covid-19 began to wreak its havoc across the world, Friedman Benda was, like so many other venues, obliged to close its doors. Our community, like so many others, was forced into lockdown. In this moment, we asked ourselves: how can we keep the conversation going?

This was the initial impetus behind Design in Dialogue, a series of online interviews with leading figures in the field, worldwide. The formula was simple: an hourlong conversation over Zoom, hosted by writer and curator Glenn Adamson, with questions from the live audience. Each episode is archived and available, for free and for the foreseeable future, on the gallery’s web platforms.

The program began close to home, with Misha Kahn, whose exhibition at the gallery Soft Bodies/Hard Spaces had to be prematurely closed. It’s hard to overstate how good it was to have that first public conversation. At a time of anxiety and grief, we were able to get in touch with this young creator, and his optimistic energy.

It was an auspicious beginning. Over the next weeks and months, the program grew both in scale and ambition.

We spiraled outward from the gallery’s program, speaking to curators and critics, architects and artists, leaders in fashion, graphics, and experience design. Media partnerships with Dezeen, and subsequently with DesignBoom, helped attract further audience. Gradually, the goal shifted. No longer were we trying to just keep the conversation going; we were also working to expand it.

In June, this objective took on new impetus, with the renewed wave of protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Episode 38 was a landmark: a powerful statement by Ini Archibong, concerning the realities of racial basis in the world of art and design. Inspired by the call to action, we committed to a more purposefully inclusive strategy. In June, the pioneering New York-based designer Stephen Burks joined Design in Dialogue as a co-host, to help realize this goal.

The series has continued to expand in the months since, ranging widely across discipline and geography. Most recently we have begun to conduct interviews in languages other than English, beginning with a three-part conversation with the great luminary of Italian radicalism, Andrea Branzi (hosted by design historian Catharine Rossi).

Our intention is to continue this work, overcoming one of the most significant dividing lines that remains in the field – language barrier – to build a still fuller picture.

As we look ahead to upcoming programs, we also are thinking deeper into the future, considering how these interviews may serve as an archive of this unprecedented moment, and the way one interconnected community responded to it. Our hope is that they will remain viewable to the public for many years, eventually coming to constitute a time capsule of sorts, a cross-section of creative thinking. At time of writing, the series as a whole has attracted several hundred thousand views, we are rapidly approaching our 75th episode… and we’re just getting started.

- Glenn Adamson, Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art

Design in Dialogue | Episode #6: Najla El Zein | April 20, 2020

Design in Dialogue | Episode #21: Cindi Strauss | May 29, 2020

Design in Dialogue | Episode: 25: Gaetano Pesce | June 10, 2020

Design in Dialogue | Episode #38: Ini Archibong | July 10, 2020

Design in Dialogue | Episode #45: Daniel Arsham | July 10, 2020

Design in Dialogue | Episode #49: Bijoy Jain | August 12, 2020

Design in Dialogue | Episode #63: Samuel Ross | September 30, 2020

Design in Dialogue | Episode #68: FormaFontasma | October 21, 2020

Design in Dialogue | Episode #72: Andrea Branzi | November 2, 2020

W h a t Wo u l d H a v e B e e n 2020

Published by Friedman Benda 515 West 26th Street New York, NY 10001 Tel. + 1 212 239 8700 www.friedmanbenda.com Special thanks to the studios of Ini Archibong, Daniel Arsham, Andrea Branzi, Paul S. Briggs, Estudio Campana, Byung Hoon Choi, Paul Cocksedge, Carmen D’Apollonio, Andile Dyalvane, Najla El Zein, KAWS, Front Design, Bruno Gambone, gt2P, Florian Idenburg (SO - IL), Misha Kahn, Joris Laarman, Raphael Navot, nendo, Erez Nevi Pana, OrtaMiklos, Gaetano Pesce, RawEdges, Samuel Ross, Chris Schanck, Mattias Sellden, Faye Toogood, Toomas Toomepuu, Jonathan Trayte, Marcel Wanders, James Wines, & Thaddeus Wolfe.

Special thanks to the estates of Wendell Castle, Shiro Kuramata, Ettore Sottsass, & John Mason.

Photography by Julian Anderson, Marie Angeletti, Damien Arlettaz, Daniel Arsham, Steve Benisty, Erik Benjamins, Julia Bidermann, Bae Bien-U, Francesco Brigida, Mark Cocksedge, Timothy Doyon, Filip Dujardin, Leonard Faustle, Clare Gatto, Michelle & Chris Gerard, Manfredi Gioacchini, Alexei Hay, Erik Henderson, Erik & Petra Hesmerg, Joe Kramm, Daniel Kukla, Karen & Josette, Fernando Laszlo, Vincent Leroux, Andrew Meredith, Angus Mill, Raphael Navot, Takayuki Ogawa, Lucy Orta, Hayden Phipps, Adam Reich, Claudia Rothkagel, Koral Silko, Philip Sinden, John Smith, Johannes van Assem, & Andreas Zimmerman.

All content copyright of Friedman Benda and the artist.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition What Would Have Been, November 5 - December 12, 2020.