When considering Maria Pergay, it is necessary to invoke the hyphen. But even a descriptor like designer-artist-decorator doesn’t begin to contain the whole of the late designer’s experience or her legacy. A Parisian emigrée active from the mid-20th century through the start of the 21st, Pergay took stainless steel and more or less sculpted it, adding poetry to what is usually considered a mostly functional material. She brought a softness to it, a lightness, and a true sense of imaginative play. She could pull off minimalist spareness or go intricately maximal, sometimes drawing inspiration from the precision and patterns of geometry or origami folds, sometimes fashioning metal that appears to be moving or melting, animate and soulful.
Opening this week at New York’s Demisch Danant gallery, the exhibition Precious Strength: Maria Pergay Across the Decades aims to secure Pergay’s place as a design pioneer, alongside fellow female powerhouses like Charlotte Perriand and Eileen Gray. Highlighting the evolution of her work, Precious Strength will feature more than 30 pieces, shown together for the first time, many of which haven’t been displayed in decades. While Pergay was successful throughout her working life, it was only in her later years that the honors and accolades arrived, that her pieces began commanding high prices at auction and were acquired by museums. (Pergay died in 2023, at age 93). In 2012, she was appointed as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, awarded to those who have made major contributions to French culture. If sexism played a role in her delayed recognition, so did the fact that her work has never fit into neat, identifiable categories. It can be hard to place within a larger stylistic movement or easily reduce it to a trend. Pergay herself balked at the potentially limiting roles of artist, designer, or decorator, preferring the broader “captor of ideas.”