We’ve often talked on this site about how the work of Danish sculptor Carl Emil Jacobsen fits into a larger trend of what’s happening in design and art right now. But we’ve never actually talked about what makes Jacobsen’s work so great on its own merits. Luckily, a Design Week exhibition at Patrick Parrish Gallery, curated by Henriette Noermark, gave us the opportunity to dig deep: Called “Don’t Know What Shape I’m In,” the show features riffs on Jacobsen’s Powder Variations series, for which Jacobsen sculpts works in fiber-reinforced concrete, and then colors them with pigments he’s created using crushed, Danish-sourced bricks, tiles, and stones, creating a palette of deep terracotta, chalky yellow, burned eggplant, and more. “For this exhibition, I decided we needed something new to compliment those shapes and colors,” explains Noermark, “and when visiting his studio in the countryside of Jutland in Denmark, I saw all these amazing tests and fragments of something he was trying out, a new raw material that could be made in the same, if not more, experimental, intuitive manner as with the powder forms — steel.” For the metal works in the exhibition, Jacobsen cuts and reassembles pieces of metal that have been burned in a fire to deepen their prunelike color. A seriously beautiful new body of work, on view in New York until June 24.

PHOTOS BY CLEMENS KOIS FOR PATRICK PARRISH GALLERY