Gloria Cortina

Great design happens when ideas collide, creating new and unexpected objects, spaces, and concepts. When an architect meets a client; when a craftsman experiments with a new material; when a straight line meets a circle. When these things—material, proportion, shape—work in unison, something is created that anyone can recognize, but can be difficult to describe. The work of Gloria Cortina (b. 1972) achieves this feat we simply call the sublime.

Raised by two grandmothers in two comfortable homes in Mexico City—one traditional, the other early modern—her taste developed in two extremes. Initially forbidden to follow her passion to pursue architecture, she studied philosophy. It was only after moving to New York when she was able to enroll at the Parsons School of Design where her teachers recognized her sense of proportion informed by her lived experience. Mrs. Barragan, they called her.

References to nature in Cortina’s oeuvre can occur in handpicked marble or hammered brass, but sometimes these notions are more overt or even decorative. Her North and South Cabinet is rendered in blackened steel and Negro Monterrey marble, with doors and sides made from thousands of porcelain “feathers” that take 10 days to assemble by hand.

The exhibition also includes the designer’s first foray into two-dimensional design with a wool tapestry called Sketch. Inspired by the works of Anni and Josef Albers, the seven-foot handwoven work in Mexican wool was handmade in Guadalajara and conceived as a form of abstract communication. A graphite sketch by Cortina’s hand has been brought to life by a rare atelier in Guadalajara that dates back to the 17th century and can only produce a handful of pieces each year.