David Wiseman

Photograph by Mark Hanauer, courtesy of Wiseman Studio.

One of the great pleasures of the contemporary design landscape is seeing past ideas revivified. David Wiseman is like a one-man compendium of twentieth-century decorative art, putting everything together in the blender of his imagination and mixing it on high—japonisme, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, various idioms of modernism and Pop art. Connecting it all is a persistent naturalism, an instinct to create form the same way that trees grow branches, or rivers fork into streams.

This expansive quality has made Wiseman particularly adept at large-scale, site-specific commissions. He is able to take a flat ceiling or wall and turn it into a lush garden landscape, and his three-dimensional work operates with the same ornamental instinct. While entirely contemporary in their cut-and-pasted compositions, the works recall historical modes of the Baroque era: allegorical imagery and cabinets of curiosity.