Maria Pergay: Between Ideas and Design
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| Maria Pergay |
Stuart Isett for the New York Times
Currents | QandA
New York Times
By RIMA SUQI
Published: May 19, 2010
Last weekend, while New York City was overrun by design enthusiasts in town for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, Maria Pergay, a 79-year-old Parisian furniture designer relatively unknown in this country, was ensconced in a nautical modernist room at the Maritime Hotel.
She was in New York not for the furniture fair — an event, it turns out, that she has never heard of — but to show her latest work at the
Demisch Danant gallery in Chelsea (including a sofa of broken bricks she is shown sitting on). Those expecting a woman of her age to produce soft, feminine, upholstered pieces appropriate for a Paris pied-à-terre may be surprised by what has been Ms. Pergay’s material of choice for decades: stainless steel...
"Making Its Mark"
Art and Antiques, 2006
"Today, a handful of renowed artists, notably Silas Kopf, Maria Pergay, Jay Stanger and Jean-Charles Spindler, innovatively employ marquetry and parquetry and inlay and intarsia in their work as a means to an artistic end. “There are not a lot of contemporary artists working with marquetry,” says Scott Jacobson, owner of Manhattan’s Leo Kaplan Modern. “It’s highly skilled work and painstaking.”
Regardless of the style or type of inlay, the wide appeal of marquetry is more than surface deep. Art lovers, for example, are drawn to Pergay’s work, which incorporates stainless steel inlays in a variety of finishes and other unusual combinations of precious woods and natural elements like mother of pearl, says Suzanna Demisch, a partner in Manhattan’s Demisch Danant, “because they can’t figure out how it’s done.”While cutting-edge sculptural works like Pergay’s, which sell for $15,000 to $150,000, prove that marquetry and parquetry and inlays and intarsia always will have a place in the art world, the craft it takes to turn out tour-de-force pieces is another matter."
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