David WisemanTEFAF 2024

Though decades apart, David Wiseman and Rebecca Salsbury James share a passion for nature and a commitment to American craft and beauty. A visit to David’s sprawling LA Elysian Park workshop is to go back in time with spacious areas devoted to a trade: porcelain slip-casting, mold making, enamel laying, bronze pouring, etc. Behind glowing kilns and foundry furnaces stands a warehouse room stacked high with wax and plaster molds of plant species —their flowers, leaves and branches, succulents, mushrooms, critters and creatures —real and imagined, cast and hand-sculpted. Lunch breaks among artisans are taken together on a long picnic table under sycamore trees and a carefully curated garden of rare but local species; his garden doubling as his “nature laboratory.”

For the past four years, he has imagined the seasons through the Chinese myth of the Monkey King and its fantastical characters of the Flower Fruit Mountain. From this fable, with its whimsical foliage, moons, rivers, and creatures, Wiseman has carved and cast new sets of resin + bronze chairs and stools, marble + bronze tables, and bronze + glass + porcelain + lacquer + crystal pendants and mirrors—introduced for the first time at TEFAF New York. His fresh combinations of materials and new patterns are both elaborate and highly refined. After years of working together on commissions, it is our great pleasure and delight to present Wiseman’s newest series to our art and design communities.

—Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn

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Salon 94’s 2024 TEFAF presentation features a wide selection of paintings by Rebecca Salsbury James (1891-1968), understood to be the largest of her work in New York since her lifetime. The seven reverse oil on glass paintings, created between c. 1930 and 1951, speak to an exceptionally important thread of 20th Century American Modernism—from Stieglitz's An American Place to resettling in Taos with O'Keeffe—and will be shown alongside work by Brazilian artist Ione Saldanha (1919-2001), American artist Judy Chicago (b.1939), British artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011), and French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)

For more information on David Wiseman, please contact Jackie Greenberg