Ferréol Babin: In a Landscape
French designer Ferréol Babin makes his New York solo debut with In a Landscape, on view at Friedman Benda through April 18, 2026. The exhibition introduces a significant new direction in the designer’s practice: painted furniture that fuses his longstanding love of natural materials, specifically wood, with the improvisational language of landscape painting.
French designer Ferréol Babin makes his New York solo debut with In a Landscape, on view at Friedman Benda through April 18, 2026. The exhibition introduces a significant new direction in the designer’s practice: painted furniture that fuses his longstanding love of natural materials, specifically wood, with the improvisational language of landscape painting.
Born in Dijon in 1987, Babin studied Space Design at the ENSA in Dijon, before relocating to Japan’s Nagoya University of Art & Design, where he came to recognize that architecture was not the right scale for his ideas and shifted his focus decisively toward objects. Early in his career he gained wide recognition with the Lunaire lamp for Fontana Arte, which was a graduation project that remains in production today. More recently, Babin moved away from industrial design to make things entirely by hand, beginning with carved wooden spoons before expanding into larger sculptural furniture. Works in the current exhibition include oak chairs, sideboards, shelving structures, and tables, several incorporating stoneware and wood inlay.
For this new body of work at Friedman Benda, Banin adds painting into the mix. For the artist, picking up a brush is not a departure but an extension — another way of processing the French countryside that surrounds his workshop and inspires him daily. Working with timber from neighbouring forests, he treats the wood surface as a canvas, distilling what he sees in the landscape into colour and texture. The results sit somewhere between functional object and plein air painting: a sideboard becomes a stage for rolling hills and open skies; a cabinet door holds a fragment of horizon. The collection connects to folk art traditions, yet stands firmly within a contemporary context.
His preferred tools are largely manual, he is particularly attached to the kogatana, a Japanese slicer he has earlier described as the most versatile instrument in his workshop, in part because of its slow, deliberate quality. He describes his creative mind as split between the rational instincts of a product designer and the freedom of a sculptor, and it is that productive tension that gives his pieces their distinctive character: purposeful in form, poetic in feeling.
Babin has previously talked about his main inspirations being the nature surrounding him and his formative time in Japan — two presences that run quietly through everything in this show. In a Landscape is on view at Friedman Benda, 515 W 26th Street, New York, through April 18, 2026.
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