Material Intent: Color and Form at Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Carpenters Workshop Gallery New York, at 693 Fifth Avenue in Midtown East, is showing the group exhibition Material Intent: Color and Form from May 13 through October 18, 2026. Built around the warmth, brightness and light associated with summer, it places contemporary and historic design side by side and invites a playful exchange between object and setting.

The focus falls on lighting sculptures by Léa Mestres, a French artist who divides her time between Paris and Audierne. Finding the design world too earnest, she turns to whimsy and nostalgia to give functional objects a distinct personality. Many of her lamps are made from a plaster she developed herself, called lélélite. The floor lamp Dixie (2022, 190 cm tall, unique) has a rough surface painted in a yellow-to-white gradient, and Kelly (2025, 70 cm, unique) and Kyle appear alongside it. Named after friends, family and fictional characters, the series favors organic shapes, tactile surfaces and vivid paint.

In a newer body of work, Mestres uses colorful mosaic tiles to depict landscapes drawn from places she has visited. 4-6 Ciutat Vella, a large yellow standing lamp, takes its cue from the mosaics of the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona.

Works from the gallery's wider roster fill out the show. A hanging Fragile Future sculpture by DRIFT fixes hundreds of dandelion heads to LED lights within a copper lattice. Roger Herman's instinctive color runs from the painting White Door to a range of ceramics. Contrasting materials are on view too: the Campana Brothers' Bolotas seating is covered in fluffy purple wool, while José Zanine Caldas's pequi wood dining chairs come from his Denuncia collection of protest furniture. George Nakashima's coffee table is American black walnut, and Vincenzo De Cotiis combines cast brass with black lacquered wood.

Other participants include Maarten Baas, Tiarra Bell, Robert Stadler, Line Vautrin, Studio Job and Harry Nuriev. Together the works make the case that design can reach past utility toward emotional and visual response, through light, color and texture.

The New York gallery is open Monday to Friday 10am–6pm and Saturday 11am–5pm, and closed Sunday. Lightness of Form, by Terence Woodgate and John Barnard, runs there over the same dates.