Onna House will present Supernatural Beauty, a group exhibition of work by Lisa Eisner, Saskia Friedrich, Tamiko Kawata, Lisbeth McCoy, Adriana Meunié, and Setsuko Morita. Ranging from natural-fiber textiles to handmade jewelry and metal sculptures, each of these works celebrates the pleasure of discovery—artists dedicated to exploring the delicate and intricate qualities of their medium and encouraging audiences to draw their own stylistic and thematic associations from their work.
When unifying metals and stones for her bespoke jewelry, Lisa Eisner allows nature to guide form. She sees each piece as a sculpture or talisman that will be passed down through generations, accentuating the unique qualities of turquoise, white and black jade, sun stone, imperial topaz, citrine, malachite, and simbercite. Saskia Friedrich conceives of her work as an environment, a space in which she translates impressions from nature and her psyche into meditative compositions of simplified shapes. Each artwork—rendered in earth-toned mixed media—resembles a stone, and is influenced by architecture, ecology, sustainability, urbanism, as well as Sufi mysticism and whirling.
Tamiko Kawata’s creative practice lives in the cross-cultural dialogue embedded in her identity as a Japanese-born American immigrant. Working in a variety of media, Tamiko’s artwork is a visual diary of observations from her adult life in the United States—creating intimate works from everyday objects that are often overlooked in order to explore the plentiful and wasteful dimensions of American life. For Lisbeth McCoy, art is a place to contemplate the existential: who we are and how we are shaped by life and experience. She communicates these sensations of interconnectedness through sculptures that bend, curl, and spiral—forms that, like memory, are fluid and can shift perspective.
Adriana Meunié was drawn to making textiles as they gave her the opportunity to explore vegetal textures and shapes, striving to achieve what she describes as a “monstrous elegance.” Working with materials like wool, esparto, carritx, and raffia sourced from the land around her home in Mallorca, Adriana presents fibers in their raw form—celebrating ancient traditions and admiring forces of nature. Setsuko Morita’s sculptures are ornate webs of copper and iron wire. Positioning spotlights on suspended mobiles, each sculpture forms a shadow, a dimensional piece that invites the audience to contemplate themes of reality, fiction, and transience.
As Onna House’s final exhibition of the 2023 season, Supernatural Beauty furthers their mission to support and inspire curiosity, inquiry, and sanctuary for contemporary women artists and designers based locally and internationally. Onna House founder and curator Lisa Perry explains “I love the idea of bringing together six women artists from multiple disciplines and backgrounds to find in essence they all speak a similar language with the common goal of seeking beauty in the ordinary and the extraordinary.”
About Lisa Eisner
Based between Cheyenne, New York, Paris, and Los Angeles, Lisa Eisner is a magazine editor, photographer. book publisher, and jewelry designer. Inspired by the precious stones of the American West, jewelry from the 1970s, and beauty in all its forms, Lisa launched her first handmade jewelry collection in 2014. Each one-of-a-kind stone is hand-selected and then set in bronze or gold—precious metals that are either forged or molded using the lost-wax casting technique.
About Saskia Friedrich
Born in Munich, Germany, Saskia Friedrich earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. The artist has participated in exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Galerie MaxWeberSixFriedrich, Munich; Willoughby Sharp Gallery, New York; Achim Kubinski Gallery, New York; The Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, New York; Southampton Arts Center, Southampton; Autobody, Bellport, New York, and Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, among others. In 2018, Friedrich was the Artist in Residence at the Watermill Center in Watermill, New York.
About Tamiko Kawata
Tamiko Kawata was born in 1936 in Kobe, Japan, and raised in Tokyo. She received her BA in Sculpture, studying both at the University of Tsukuba and the University of Tokyo. She immigrated to the United States in 1961, where she settled in Washington DC to study English—shortly after which she relocated to New York in 1962, where she currently lives and works. Influenced by Bauhaus, Dada, and Gutai, her work contemplates themes at the intersection of Japanese and American identity and expression.
About Lisbeth McCoy
Born on the island of Fyn in Denmark, Lisbeth McCoy is a multimedia artist based in New York City. She received her MFA cum laude from the New York Academy of Art. McCoy’s work has been exhibited in numerous galleries in New York, including Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art, Jason McCoy Gallery, and the New York Academy of Art, among others. Her work is included in private collections in the United States and Europe. Currently, her work is on display in the exhibition PAPER at Smith Gallery in Cooperstown, New York—on view through September 2, 2023.
About Adriana Meunié
Adriana Meunié was raised on the island of Mallorca in Spain, where she currently lives and has a studio in the town of Campos. She studied fashion design at the BAU College of Arts and Design in Barcelona, using natural textiles as a way to carve out an intimate and sustainable space in the fashion industry and explore themes such as the interior/exterior, abstract landscape, and emotion/sensation. Recent exhibitions and installations of her work include a collaboration with Massimo Dutti and Architectural Digest for ARCO Madrid in 2022, and Xtant’s presentation at Art Basel Miami in 2021.
About Setsuko Morita
Setsuko Morita was born in Tokyo, Japan. Setsuko is a self-taught artist whose practice began in 1992 with the creation of wire mobiles. In 1995, she enrolled in the Shinagawa Vocational Training School where she studied in the metal department. She currently lives and works in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, Japan.
About Lisa Perry
Lisa Perry is a designer, collector, curator and the founder of Onna House. Lisa’s studies of fashion and textiles led to her collecting vintage couture clothing from the late 1960s, eventually starting her own lifestyle brand to reflect the spirit of that time. A highlight of Lisa’s design work has been creating limited-edition collections in collaboration with artists or foundations (such as Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Indiana), reflecting years of personal collecting across modernism, pop and minimalism. Lisa’s love of home and interior design has also been a long time passion, highlighted in Lisa Perry Homes, published by Assouline. Lisa is also a lifelong advocate for women’s rights with decades of support for women’s organizations. This advocacy has come full circle with the creation of Onna House.
About Onna House
Onna House is a sanctuary filled with art, furniture, and objects by women artists and designers. With a dual mission to support and create visibility for these artists and provide a gallery space to display their work, founder Lisa Perry combines her passions under one roof to carefully curate the private home and studio, acting as a space for women artists to engage and collaborate and for collectors to discover new work.
