Le Cabinet de Curiosités​,​ by French-born Thierry W. Despont

Le Cabinet de Curiosités, conceived and curated by French-born architect and artist Thierry W. Despont, was an unusual off-site exhibition presented by Marlborough Fine Art and the Steinitz Gallery — the famed Parisian dealer of period furniture and antiques — held in a former Tribeca loft space. The father-and-son team from Steinitz, Bernard and Benjamin, shipped dazzling 18th-century boiserie and objets d'art to transform the space into a labyrinthine Second Empire apartment organized into five airy rooms, while contemporary art converged with antique furnishings and architecture to create a setting both old-world and otherworldly. The exhibition brought together Manolo Valdés's trompe-l'oeil Libreria sculptures, Claudio Bravo's hyperrealist paintings — the first posthumous showing of his work — and Despont's own Nebula paintings of imaginary celestial orbs alongside his fantastical sculptural creatures assembled from found objects and tools, including his remarkable mechanical insect sculptures displayed in frames. Despont described his vision as being "obsessed with being the cartographer of the dream world," an environment designed to take visitors literally into his dream and delight in "the surprise of the unexpected."