Marc Newson - Design New York Wednesday, June 3, 2009 | Phillips

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  • Exhibited

     

  • Literature

    Alice Rawsthorn, Marc Newson, London, 1999, pp. 38-41; Conway Lloyd Morgan, Marc Newson, London, 2002, pp. 162-163

  • Catalogue Essay

    This carbon “Black Hole” table will be included as “MN-13CBHT2-2005” in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of limited editions by Marc Newson, currently being prepared by Didier Krzentowski of Galerie Kreo, Paris. 
     
     
    An event horizon is the verge of a black hole, a point of no return from which light, matter, and radiation cannot escape. But approach is also impossible, for the horizon recedes, always out of reach. Two of Marc Newson’s early tables, "Black Hole" (1988) and "Event Horizon" (1992), directly address the designer’s abiding interest in outer space, and inner too. The partially hollow legs of each table, like funnels, are conceptual renderings of black holes. “Both my sculptural work and the production furniture have always had as much to do with what is not there as what is there—the voids, the interior spaces, the things that you don’t see” (Gagosian Gallery, 2007).  Newson manifests the conundrums of the material universe through earthly materials, carbon fiber and aluminum in the case of those early tables. He renders the remote vagaries of the cosmos as accessible local objects, platforms for daily life; "Black Hole" swallows pens and pennies.
     
    In the catalog accompanying Newson’s 2007 solo show at Gagosian Gallery, curator Louise Neri wrote: “Across his protean output, Newson has been preoccupied with how to achieve a maximum sense of volume with the least amount of material (or mass) possible, thereby creating space as a grand illusion of that volume.” Compact and dense, a black hole’s extreme mass creates a gravitational pull from which even light can’t escape—a heavy notion. Perversely, Newson molded his table from carbon fiber, a low-density material whose lightness adds unexpected contradiction. A single thread of carbon fiber consists of thousands of bundled filaments. Woven in a twill pattern, as in the present case, the minute warp and weft of the carbon yarn is distinct and viewable, not vast and unknowable like the woolly idea it represents. Newson doesn’t conjecture, he builds. 

88

“Black Hole” table

2005
Carbon fiber.
28 1/2 x 97 1/4 x 40 in. (72.4 x 247 x 101.6 cm.)
Produced by Marc Newson, France.  Number five from an edition of ten, plus two artist’s proofs and one prototype. Underside with metal roundel stamped with “MN/Black hole table/5 / 10” and signature.

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Design

3 June 2009, 11am
New York