Stone as Memory, Gallery as Stage
M. Fisher New York
originally published in Korean in the April 2025 issue of Maison Marie Claire Korea
원문은 메종 마리끌레르 2025년 2월호에 게재되었습니다
April 2025
By Summer Park 박지민
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
In Manhattan’s historic Seaport district, artist and designer Matthew Fisher has opened his first gallery, M. Fisher. Trained as a ballet dancer in his youth, Fisher imagined the space not as a sterile, neutral white cube but as something closer to a stage: atmospheric and quietly composed. The gallery is largely divided into three rooms, yet it flows from one into another like acts in a play. The first room is open and inviting, its walls lined with black walnut cabinetry. At the center is a table holding a collection of Fisher’s stone objects—candelabras, bowls, trays, vessels—each carved from richly veined marble. Beyond this first room, a rotunda, modeled on the now-dismantled Paris apartment of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, opens beneath a soft overhead light. A round marble table in the center holds an arrangement of stone bowls, their natural grain intact. The final room closes the scene with a velvet-red sofa, stone stools, and a metallic-thread curtain that opens onto a courtyard—surprisingly serene in a city that rarely is.
Fisher draws from classical architecture and the decorative arts of 19th- and 20th-century Europe, but his work is shaped just as much by the slow logic of stone. He listens for its shifts, its flaws, its embedded time. From the soft Bianco Carrara to boldly veined Paonazzo marble and the quiet glow of Moonstone onyx, each stone is sourced from quarries across the world, chosen not for its perfection but for its character. Embracing what others discard—the cracks, the color shifts, the irregularities—Fisher gives them form. And in his gallery, they settle into the space like props on a stage, each quietly performing its part.
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson
Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson