October 16, 2025 |
A haphazard stack of moose antlers, a sofa made from 5,000-year-old swamp wood, a rustic California king bed fit for a gothic woodsman; that’s the kind of stuff you’ll see at the highly-anticipated Michèle Lamy-curated Rick Owens Furniture exhibition which opened on Tuesday. Called Rust Never Sleeps and presented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery at Ladbroke Hall, the show feels like a manifesto in material form: one that reveres decay as revelation, and oxidation as its own aesthetic language.
Walking in, you sense immediately that this isn’t about pristine surfaces or sterile minimalism. Instead, rust is alive – a patina, a pulse. Owens, with Lamy as his ever-fearless accomplice, stages oxidation as process and proof: corrosion here is less failure than survival, less decline than metamorphosis. The title, borrowed from Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 1979 album, is not decorative but defiant. “For me, Rust Never Sleeps has a lot of meaning,” says Lamy. “These pieces are in metal, and we stop the process of rust at the point where we want it to be. It also has a meaning, as in the Neil Young song – it seems like decades pass by, but we resist.” On the first track on the album Young sings, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Lamy says, “That’s what I want to celebrate, that we stand strong, we resist what is happening right now, and we try our best to make a change. We are here to stay.”
At the heart of the exhibition is Antler Bed (2025), shown publicly for the first time. Beds have always been the beginning for Owens and Lamy. “We have three key pieces, and one is the bed – because we always start with the bed,” Lamy explains. “As soon as we moved to Paris, the first thing we built was a bed. Then the bed evolved: first in plywood, covered with a wool blanket. That reproduction of the original bed is now in the show [Temple of Love] at Palais Galliera. This time, you will see the famous big alabaster bed. And now, we have a new bed that is so important we must show you in person, because it’s difficult to describe without seeing it.”
Antler Bed, sculpted in recycled elm wood, feels at once archaic and futuristic. Its skeletal form could be lifted from a hunting lodge or a sci-fi set, while its raw surface insists on fragility as much as permanence. Elsewhere, Owens’ sculptural instincts move toward the monumental. K Plug Table (2022), a 360cm altar-esque centrepiece is imagined here in steel rust. “Outside we have a table – it’s the first time we are showing it, and it’s in metal,” Lamy says. “These tables are all about the concept we use: the top sits on the base, but nothing is attached. Everything fits inside each other from the feet. It’s very hard to describe – it’s a mix of black rust and red rust, the finish is a different colour – but one of my favourite things is that table.”
Then there’s Pedalò Rust (2025), a curved chair fitted with leather cushions, which provides what Lamy calls the “big dinner party” mood of the show – the gallery hosted an intimate dinner on Thursday last week to celebrate the display. “That is what makes sculptural furniture difficult: you live with it, but then you also have to use it. And in the gallery, you cannot say ‘you cannot sit on it.’ Yes, you can. That’s the way it has to be,” says Lamy.
One of the most striking pieces is the sofa in bois de marais, or swamp wood, pulled from Poland and carbon-dated at 5,000 years old. “If we had not taken it out, it would take 200,000 years to petrify,” says Lamy. “There is a lot of recycling in the name [of the exhibition]. With rust too – we don’t want to decay. We continue. We create from that. We don’t let things go.”
The staging at Ladbroke Hall is integral to the experience. Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s West London home – formerly the headquarters of the Sunbeam Talbot Motor Company, now complete with ornate mouldings and a grand restaurant [Pollini] – is reimagined here under Lamy’s curatorial direction. “The Carpenters Gallery has this huge building with incredible decoration,” she says. “When I say I’m curating this show, it’s because I broke that mold and moved everything inside. My point was: we show our furniture, but people will live in it – at our bar [Lamyland], at our dinner, at our tables, all around the furniture. It’s not just about looking at it and then walking away.”
And while the title suggests erosion, the mood is anything but defeatist. “We all decay and time passes by, but we resist. Creativity keeps us going,” says Lamy. “This is part of our DNA. I thought the Brutalist art in London was interesting, and we could connect with it easily through these pieces. Everything we have done comes from this spirit – from building with concrete, from very raw statements. The bed, in a way, is brutal in its result. Even if it is not directly related, I dreamed we could connect. That’s why London is good for this. Brutalism, and everything it relates to, is part of our DNA.”
Ultimately, Rust Never Sleeps feels less like an exhibition and more like an installation you’re invited to inhabit. “We have done many exhibitions with the gallery, but this one is completely new,” says Lamy. “We had shown one piece before, but this was the first time we brought together these works. I thought it was a nice history to present. It is not so much an exhibition as a big role. But the pieces stand by themselves; they can really say something new. They show that we are continuing, that we are resisting the world as it goes backward, as it becomes terrible. We keep going, believing in our design – signing our statement for the world, as loud as we can be.”
Rust Never Sleeps runs at Ladbroke Hall until February 14, 2026, with free entry. For those intrigued by design that demands presence, not prettiness, this is not to be missed.
Photography by Benjamin Baccarani, courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
Michèle Lamy at Owenscorp
