Faye Toogood Assemblage 7: Lost and Found

Friedman Benda is pleased to present Faye Toogood’s Assemblage 7: Lost and Found, the groundbreaking designer’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Burrowing into Britain’s material history and its important role in defining national culture, Assemblage 7 sees Toogood engage with Oak and Purbeck Marble–native materials with deep, historic roots to create final forms that allude to that which may have been hidden by time.

Oak and Purbeck Marble, tied to both objects and architecture, have formed a backbone of British material culture since the Middle Ages. Oak beams formed 16th and 17th century timber-framed housing and was adroitly manipulated into ornate wood paneling and traditional furniture. Purbeck Marble, in fact a fossilized limestone hewn from the Southern English coast, was the material of choice in churches and cathedrals (including Canterbury Cathedral) across England by 1200 A.D., its deep blue and green lustrous hue enlisted for its decorative quality.

In Toogood’s hands these materials are excavated and cast anew. Digging down to find voids and reintroduce traces of the past to the modern day, Toogood has brought these ancient materials into a fresh light. Venerating the primacy of traditional artisanal carving techniques, each work has been shaped through the immediacy of subtractive carving, their alternately rippling or sweeping surfaces suggestive of the surface of the land itself or the stratigraphy of an archaeological dig.

At once romantic yet rigorous, executed in final forms that play with positive and negative space, Toogood’s Assemblage 7 takes on a neo-Duchampian quality, with the objects akin to the objet trouvé. With a nod to archaic lodestones, cairns, and barrows, here the lost becomes found.

Accompanying this exhibition, Faye Toogood: Drawing, Material, Sculpture, Landscape will be released by Phaidon in July, 2022. The first in-depth look at the work of the globally celebrated and multidisciplinary London-based designer Faye Toogood, this publication covers all aspects of her work, from clothes and furniture, to installations and interior design. Friedman Benda will host a book signing at the opening reception of the exhibition.