Salon 94 showcases ceramics inside its New York mansion
Inside an upper-level gallery space in Salon 94’s Upper East Side mansion, ceramic works by Tom Sachs they appear behind glass, placed in a white cabinet with red tape along its edges and a familiar NASA mark repeated on their imperfect surfaces.
Some look like bowls, some look like fragments salvaged from a kiln disaster, and others seem to have been rebuilt enough to suggest the shape they were once meant to have. Patched surfaces, taped seams, and lumpy edges make the case look like a lab file on top of a display of valuables.
The setting is Tom Sachs Furniture, a comprehensive exhibition bringing together new and older works in furniture, ceramics, lighting, sculpture and painting.
On May 20, the gallery opened Satan Ceramics, a group show featuring works by Mary Frey, JJ Peet, Pat McCarthy, Luc Hammond-Thomas and Sachs. As it ran alongside Furniture which opened on April 24, 2026, the overlay gives the overall display its intensity. Sachs’s furniture creates the structure, while the ceramics bring the messier language of touch, use, damage and repair.
Tom Sachs, Furniture, Living Room 94 Design | image © designboom
Tom Sachs treats clay as proof
In all Tom Sachs ceramic bowls and cups, failure is built into the process. A bowl with a blackened rim stands on small metal legs like a hand-crafted piece of space equipment, while nearby, torn white overalls are sewn back together with gauze, tape and visible repairs.
The NASA logo gives the works a strange institutional confidence, even when the clay itself looks soft, bruised, or barely held in place.
Here is where the artistHis wider practice enters the ceramic work, with a view within Salon 94Upper East Side mansion. His objects often leave exposed screws, joints, seams and studio decisions, and the bowls follow the same logic on a smaller scale. They keep the work he did for them.
The repaired pieces feel particularly strong because they resist the clean finish expected from functional ceramics. They point to an intended shape and then leave the viewer with whatever interrupted it.
Tom Sachs, Furniture, Living Room 94 Design | image © designboom
JJ Peet contrasts ceramic history
Among the Satan Ceramics works, pieces from artist JJ Peet gives the exhibition the strongest counterpoint. His vessels sit atop Tom Sachs’ new Walnut Jeanneret tables with a different kind of physical load, their surfaces formed through vibrant colors and blocky, fragmented textures.
Some hold flowers, turning the ceramic body into a functional vessel. Forms may resemble small ruins, tools, props, or parts of a model city that have been put to another use.
Peet’s work helps prevent the group presentation from becoming just an extension of Sachs’ world. His ceramics bring their own rhythm to the room, with small painted cavities, rough skins and openings that make each vessel feel handled over time.
They are placed against the glazed interiors of the gallery and the clean geometry of the table in a way that draws attention to the clay as a material that captures pressure. Their power comes from how directly they hold hands.
JJ Peet, Satan Ceramics, Salon 94 Design | image © designboom
the furniture becomes a support system
Tom Sachs’ new Walnut Jeanneret tables play a central role in this reading. They are furniture, but here they also function as a staging system for ceramic collections, giving the smaller works a common ground without smoothing out their differences. Their wide surfaces allow the objects of the Satan Ceramics group to be grouped together, thus turning bowls, cups, flowers and patched vases into a relaxed field of experiments.
Elsewhere in the mansion, the Sachs plywood chairs with their circular notches extend the same material behavior to the scale of the bodywork. These Shop chairs use visible fasteners and exposed construction as part of their character, with plywood surfaces shaped through a language that feels open and direct. They sit alongside larger furniture, lamps and salvaged forms to connect the ceramic works to Sachs’ long-standing interest in making objects that keep their assembly in view.
The diverse works on display are united by their refusal to treat craft as a sophisticated endpoint. Sachs and Peet approach clay as a material that can carry open faults. The repaired bowls, the flower vases, the rough bowls and the tables that hold them all become part of a common construction system where the process remains visible and the damage remains active.
Tom Sachs, Furniture, Living Room 94 Design | image © designboom
Tom Sachs, Furniture, Living Room 94 Design | image © designboom
