When considering Maria Pergay, it is necessary to invoke the hyphen. But even a descriptor like designer-artist-decorator doesn’t begin to contain the whole of the late designer’s experience or her legacy. A Parisian emigrée active from the mid-20th century through the start of the 21st, Pergay took stainless steel and more or less sculpted it, adding poetry to what is usually considered a mostly functional material. She brought a softness to it, a lightness, and a true sense of imaginative play. She could pull off minimalist spareness or go intricately maximal, sometimes drawing inspiration from the precision and patterns of geometry or origami folds, sometimes fashioning metal that appears to be moving or melting, animate and soulful.

Opening this week at New York’s Demisch Danant gallery, the exhibition Precious Strength: Maria Pergay Across the Decades aims to secure Pergay’s place as a design pioneer, alongside fellow female powerhouses like Charlotte Perriand and Eileen Gray. Highlighting the evolution of her work, Precious Strength will feature more than 30 pieces, shown together for the first time, many of which haven’t been displayed in decades. While Pergay was successful throughout her working life, it was only in her later years that the honors and accolades arrived, that her pieces began commanding high prices at auction and were acquired by museums. (Pergay died in 2023, at age 93). In 2012, she was appointed as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, awarded to those who have made major contributions to French culture. If sexism played a role in her delayed recognition, so did the fact that her work has never fit into neat, identifiable categories. It can be hard to place within a larger stylistic movement or easily reduce it to a trend. Pergay herself balked at the potentially limiting roles of artist, designer, or decorator, preferring the broader “captor of ideas.”

Born in 1930 in what is now Moldova, to Russian-Jewish parents, Pergay fled with her mother to Paris in 1937 in advance of a possible Soviet invasion. Only a few years later, she’d have to go into hiding during the Nazi Occupation of France. Once post-war life resumed, Pergay studied costume design and trained with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine. She married and started a family and, in the 1950s, created window displays for clients like Hermès and Christian Dior. In 1957, she began working in silver, designing lighting, tables, and boxes, and opened her own shop in Paris’s Place des Vosges in 1960. You wouldn’t call it ornate, but a love of little details went into her creations: motifs like belt buckles, braids, tassels, even deer antlers.

In the late ’60s, the French stainless steel company Uginox approached her to design small decorative objects, probably with the intention that she’d rework her silver pieces in steel. But Pergay went in a different direction. As a mother of four by that time, with no formal training in furniture making, what she came up with was essentially a limited-edition collection, displayed at the 1968 Maison et Jardin exhibition in Paris. It included the Flying Carpet Daybed, with its undulating base of stainless steel, and the Ring Chair, that takes the shape of a citrus rind spiral. In 2012, Pergay told the New York Times, “I was peeling an orange for my children, and thought how nice it looked.” A simple creative spark, maybe, but turning her vision into reality required determination and enough self-belief to counter prevailing attitudes and practices. “No one was doing stainless steel furniture then,” she continued. “The atelier made heavy doors, and when I asked them to make furniture they just laughed. But I pinned a huge piece of paper on the wall and drew my pieces on it to show them what to do. If necessary, I’d put my hand on the hand of the guy who was cutting the steel and tell him where to push.”

That incredibly productive year or so also saw the debut of several geometry-forward tables that feel both ingenious and inevitable: the Table Cocktail Carré, of brushed and mirror-polished stainless steel, the Three-tier Table that mixes bronze with steel, the ovoid Dining Table, whose steel top rests on a plexiglass base, and the Folded table, a steel structure of creased legs with an off-center agate inlay. The all-steel Student Desk combines curves with angularity in a deceptively simple way. Additional seating from that moment includes the Suspended Chair and the X Chair with Arms: Ribbons of stainless steel loop around to form sled legs and armrests on chairs with seats that seem to float.

At the time, steel was considered a bit passé as a material for sculptural furnishings, a continuation of early 20th-century modernism (think Marcel Breuer’s Wassily and Cesca chairs from the 1920s and those by Mies van der Rohe and Mart Stam). In the late ’60s, future-oriented designers were working with fiberglass and plastic. But Pergay never much followed the dictates of fashion. And while she would incorporate other materials — various woods, metals, pyrite, even ammonite fossils — steel became a constant. In 2010, when asked by a Times reporter what she loved about stainless steel, she replied “Everybody is scared of stainless steel, but we have a link — there is something deep inside between me and stainless steel. This material which looks so strong, hard and cold is sweet and not sharp, and it matches with everything. It is a good contrast for colors and other materials.” (And when asked if her relationship with steel was the longest in her life, she said, “It is my best marriage.”

Toward the end of the ’70s, Pergay sold her Parisian shop and would spend the next twenty years working on interior design commissions, moving to Morocco in 2000 with the intention of running a guesthouse – which is where New York gallerists Suzanne Demisch and Stéphane Danant found her. They’d championed Pergay’s work since first encountering it at a Parisian flea market in the ’90s – tracking her down through the phone book (they spent months calling various listed Pergays). They recognized a consistency of vision and an originality in her designs, and their meeting led to a new home for Pergay’s archival pieces as well as the production of new works. 2006 saw her first show in New York in over 30 years, a collaboration between Demisch Danant and the Lehmann Maupin Gallery that showcased fifteen recent pieces like Untitled (Tiger Table), a mottled mix of tinted steels, and the Drape cabinets, where it appears as if a steel layer, secured by a safety pin, is peeling away from the macassar ebony and palm wood of its interior structure.

Numerous designs would follow — the Drop Bedside Table (2008), whose reflective stainless steel appears to drip over a cube of mahogany, the dazzling Flame Sconces (2010) — but even as they progressed in form, they called back to her earlier pieces. The Rainbow Table (2010) reimagines her 1968 dining table in a swirl of colors – an experimentation with car lacquers. Belt buckles on steel Bracelet Poufs echo some of her early silver objects while also looking rather postmodern. The scope of her output is fairly dizzying, as is the way she used and transformed materials – like the Table Marronnier from 2015: stainless steel with an inlay of chestnut wood takes the shape of a live edge slab of wood, on a sculpted bronze base that resembles a tree trunk. What’s also a bit destabilizing is that so many of her earlier pieces now seem to collapse time. The angled, stainless steel Folded Chair, Model 933 from 1975 – you could place it in the mid-twentieth century just as easily as you could date it to early 2024. Like “timeless,” the word “visionary” is overused, but Pergay’s work makes them both mean something again.

Installation images by William Jess Laird