At Sydney College of the Arts, Marc Newson studied sculpture, jewelry, and furniture design. In 1984 he graduated with the outlines of a plan: technical materials, futurism, fluidity—and with inexperience, the burden of every graduate. Later that year he began shaping his now-famous Lockheed Lounge from foam, as he would a surfboard ‘blank’. His intention had been to cover the Lockheed’s fiberglass-reinforced resin core with a single sheet of aluminum: “I tried laminating it, but the thing fell apart…Eventually, I came up with the idea of beating little pieces of metal into shape with a wooden mallet, and attaching them with rivets.” (Alice Rawsthorn, Marc Newson, London, 1999, p. 5)

Lockheed Lounge, a paragon of youthful ambition, engendered all of Newson’s later preoccupations with flow and speed. A hallmark of Newson’s work, smoothness triumphs: neither joint nor junction disrupt the contours of his Alessi tray, for example, or the extruded marble tables shown at Gagosian Gallery in 2007, along with the present model. Lockheed Lounge, furrowed with seams, beguiles for the opposite reason: imperfection. Flat-head rivets literally and visually sutured together a patchwork of aluminum. Those coarse seams betrayed Newson’s early limitations, but his fluid silhouettes affirmed a clear ideal.

Newson’s Micarta series, first shown at Gagosian Gallery in 2007, is heir to those early “seamless inventions,” to borrow an expression from Louise Neri writing in that exhibition’s catalog. Neither joint nor junction disrupts the contour of the present desk, although Newson assembled it from individual pieces of compressed micarta. Two early tables, Black Hole (1988) and Event Horizon (1992), likewise boast fluid lines. Newson used common enough materials in those works (carbon fiber and aluminum), but micarta, the eponymous material of the Gagosian series, is a little-known composite of resin-impregnated linen used for knife handles and electrical insulators. Newson says, “…for me, ‘newness’ means taking something out of one context and putting it into another.” With the present lot, micarta moves from utensil to head of the table.