A Pioneer in Metal Furniture Gets a New Exhibition

17.10.2024 - 15:09 / nytimes.com

In 2014, when the artist Dan McCarthy moved from Brooklyn into a converted schoolhouse in upstate New York, he decided the grand hall would be a future gathering spot for his many Facepots: large, wonky vessels decorated with a spectrum of grins and grimaces. The earliest ones, about a decade old, recall a time of emotional swings. “I hadn’t even found the clay that worked,” McCarthy says of that experimental phase, “so a lot of the pots were breaking in the kiln.” He learned to relinquish control, repairing the salvageable works using the Japanese technique known as kintsugi, in which mended seams are accented in silver or gold. The Facepots brought a new openness to McCarthy’s practice, as did the Hudson Valley. Absent the city’s pressures, he explains, “I was like a kid — on my hands and knees, lost in making a thing.” “Freedom,”a new monograph of McCarthy’s work, charts that arc, with nods to his Southern California upbringing, seen in rainbow-colored paintings of surfers and songbirds perched on guitars. Birds also animate new ceramic works in his solo exhibition at the Tokyo gallery Kosaku Kanechika, on view through Nov. 16. For McCarthy, these first faceless pots offer a shift in narrative. “Instead of a vessel, maybe it’s a nest,” he says, describing a fascination with his neighborhood birds. Kintsugi-like detailing appears on these pieces, too: Silver-leafed slabs camouflage the occasional split, while shiny rectangles evoke the little mirrors tucked inside birdcages. For the artist, fresh off his first flight to Japan, it’s a time of possibility. “I’m 62, which is old and not,” McCarthy says. “I think I’ve got another act in me. It should be an adventure.”

Milan is often derided as a gray city, all stone facades and treeless streets. But in reality, it’s a city of gardens — albeit private ones, locked behind gates and concealed within courtyards. Among them, hidden behind the hedges of Via dei Giardini (Street of the Gardens), are the verdant grounds of Villa del Platano — a 1950s apartment building turned private residence previously owned by Santo Versace, a onetime president of Versace and the older brother of Gianni and Donatella — where the Wilde, a members’ club, will soon open its doors. Founded by Gary Landesberg, a former chairman of the Arts Club in London, the Wilde spans four floors, with a rooftop terrace and outdoor tables in the garden for al fresco dining. The Italy-born, Paris-based designer Fabrizio Casiraghi planned the interiors, which channel the vintage charm of midcentury Milan. In the ground-floor restaurant, the Club Room, the most informal of the three dining spaces, a backlit ceiling resembling Art Deco-era stained glass casts a soft light onto glossy walnut club