Vocabulary of ABSTRACTION

WORLD of RADICAL BEAUTY

Architecture, art, design, and cuisine rooted in history and high craft

CATEGORIES

Lighting

Furniture

Tableware

Accessories

Ceramics

Lighting

"We don’t believe a house is ever finished, and we don’t want it to ever be. Design is like an endless novel: if it doesn’t have humanity, it’s hollow.” — Robin and Stephen Alesch

Explore our world of French culinary craft. In SoHo, La Mercerie offers elevated French cooking by Chef Marie-Aude Rose and Executive Chef Heloïse Fischbach.

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Now On View: CASEY ZABLOCKI

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Architecture, design, art, and cuisine rooted in history and high craft.

American design brand founded by Robin and Stephen Alesch, celebrated for its distinctive vision for living rooted in inquiry, tradition, craft, and a modern sensibility.

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Continental restaurant in the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, created by the Roman and Williams team in partnership with Sotheby’s, where cuisine, design, art, and culture converge.

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Celebrated French restaurant in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, where classic French cooking meets design and craft, flowing through an arched passageway into Roman and Williams Guild.

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Vocabulary of ABSTRACTION

With Sculptural Ceramic Artist Martin Pearce
FEATURED GUILD GALLERY ARTIST

There’s nothing like a 20-year overnight success.

Martin Pearce has always been interested in ceramics and threw his first pot at age ten. His father was a primary school teacher who would use the classroom for teaching skills with pottery. And so pottery always played in the background of Martin’s life while he went on to study and practice interior design in the early 90s. During this time, he began to collect contemporary ceramics from fairs and galleries in the UK and Netherlands. Fascinated by the aesthetic and technical aspects, he began experimenting on his own. After losing his archives in a devasting fire, Martin allowed his curiosity in ceramics to take over and transform into a full-time obsession.

As an interior designer, Martin would have everything clear in his head and then draw it out. Finding the opposite is true with his ceramics; he draws by the natural process of making with less emphasis on the cerebral. His biomorphic and weighty forms enclose space and volume to a consistent dramatic effect, conveying a quiet sense of depth and ease, a sense of the ancient and mysterious. These substantial forms are hand-built rather than thrown, using coils, strips, slips and glazes, and their bold presence exudes a definite power, like long-lost chunks of some ancient monolith.

From his studio in St. Leonards-on-sea, East Sussex, England, he has two favorite parts in the making process. The first is the point when the character of a piece breaks through, when a shape is being refined or when something unforeseen emerges. The second is during the creation of a surface when deliberate mark-making is replaced with intuitive action. At both stages, a different part of his brain is tapped to create something on an intuitive level, that had not existed before.

Roman and Williams Guild is proud to champion Martin Pearce’s evocative and emotional work which has been highly regarded in the strong scene of UK ceramicists and has found a home amongst the global community of artists Roman and Williams Guild supports and represents.