resin works illuminate laura gonzalez's NYC exhibition 'landscapes'

‘landscapes’ by laura gonzalez glows in new york

Landscapes, a new exhibition by Parisian designer Laura Gonzalez, opens at her Franklin Street gallery space in New York to present a focused dialogue with French artist Fabien Conti. The show, which includes paintings, handcrafted furnishings, and sculptural lighting pieces, introduces a new direction in the designer’s practice which still continues her dedication to material experimentations and crafted interiors.

designboom previewed the exhibition ahead of its opening to speak with Gonzalez, who explained the spirit of her work: ‘We opened one and a half years ago. The new exhibition is about landscape — we are exploring the concept of landscape in different ways: texture, pattern, art, materials, and craft.

‘What’s new is that we’re doing this space like an art gallery. We call it the ‘gallery inside the gallery.’ It’s a dialogue between Fabien Conti — who is a young, 25 year-old French artist — and my lamps, which are brand new. Just eight pieces of them will be made.’

images courtesy Laura Gonzalez Studio

new lighting in dialogue with gestural paintings

The exhibition centers on this dialogue, placing Laura Gonzalez’s new series of lamps across from Fabien Conti’s atmospheric paintings. Conti’s canvases appear as suspended fields rendered from gestural strokes and diffused color. The works appear radiant and soft as the array shifts between cool greens and warm tonal gradients that suggest a sense of gentle motion.

Gonzalez clusters her lamps at the center of the space, introducing a luminous heart to the room backdropped by Conti’s paintings. Made in Paris from ecological resin with marble bases, the pieces have an organic and translucent surface that reads differently in each edition.

The designer describes the unique material and process: ‘Each of these ecological resin lamps is unique in color, and only eight of them will be made because it’s a very complicated process. This type of resin is a very new material, and when you develop a new material, it’s always touchy. So the textures and the shapes are different, but I prefer that they are all unique.‘

Laura Gonzalez debuts the Landscapes exhibition at her Franklin Street gallery in New York

Material experimentation for emerging forms

Throughout Laura Gonzalez’s New York showroom and gallery, variations of the Landscape Lamp show how this new material behaves under light. Each of the eight editions reveals a different density and chromatic drift within the resin. Meanwhile, the soft irregularity of their volumes creates an immediate connection to the gestural paintings on either side.

The show expands beyond lighting. Furniture pieces such as the Quilt table, Relief chair, and Colline sofa form a broader study of topography through line, volume, and craft. The Quilt table overlays linear color fields across a resin top supported by sculpted wooden legs, while the Relief chair introduces gentle carved undulations that seems to be shaped by the terrain.

furniture pieces such as the Quilt table and Relief chair extend the exhibition’s study of terrain

Craft as contemporary luxury

Gonzalez describes the exhibition as an exploration of new forms of luxury defined by handcraft: ‘The pieces are all very luxurious, but for me, luxury today is handcraft. Especially in our work, everything is craft, everything has a story, and everything is unique.

‘For example, this lampshade is made from silk, but it’s done in a small factory in France where they created the silk without killing the silkworms. Normally when silk is made, the silkworms are dying. So with this process, only a small quantity is developed. The process is very long and the result is very valuable. This is luxury.’

That approach appears throughout the show. The Écorce table pairs hand-shaped bronze legs with a glass top that introduces an airy counterbalance. The Eternal Mirror is framed by ceramic elements shaped like geological fragments which demonstrate the patience and detail behind each component. Landscape becomes both theme and method, encouraging visitors to understand the pieces through material progression and handmade nuance.

craft plays a central role in the exhibition with materials developed through patient experimentation