Through the Looking-Glass—Lewis Carroll’s lesser-known sequel to Alice in Wonderland—lends its title to Irene Cattaneo’s latest solo installation, curated by Ashlee Harrison. Presented in Harrison’s new private salon on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the works exude a disorienting air of enchantment.

Positioned at the entrance to the exhibition space is a piece that takes the form of a chess set. As the author Vladimir Nabokov observed, chess gains its poetry from the irregular motions of the knight—the lone piece with the power to disrupt the game’s rigid orthogonality. Cattaneo’s knight modulates the familiar equine form with a wind-smoothed, Boccionesque sense of dynamism. Cattaneo’s set, its board carved from Carrara marble and red travertine with pieces cast in bronze, brings to mind a fusion between the reduced abstraction of Man Ray’s 1920s marble chess set and the futuristic riffs on the standardized, quasi-figurative 1849 Staunton set. Cattaneo’s pawns are like dollops of cream. Her king wears a tiara of flames.

Chess also provides the plot structure to Through the Looking-Glass, in which Alice begins as a pawn, navigating a surreal landscape-cum-board toward queendom. Literature has provided a consistent source material for Cattaneo’s oeuvre—her 2024 collection, for instance, draws from Stendhal. Layering literature and her own life’s narrative, Cattaneo’s sculptures have an expanded function as elliptical biographical texts. “Alice’s growth comes to fruition only when she begins to question the meaning of the game’s rules and whether they make sense for her, ultimately progressing by thinking creatively,” the artist notes. Poignantly, Alice becomes a queen through her own efforts—not by partnering with a King. When she is escorted by a white knight, that archetype of chivalrous virtue, he recites nonsensical poetry while repeatedly falling off his own horse. Ascending her own way seems to be the only way.

Lewis Carroll was a figure of contradiction. A mathematician, he is better known for the absurdism of his dreaming than for his proofs and theorems. Cattaneo brings to her work a consonant spirit of playful paradox. A coffee table centered in the drawing room resembles a cloud caught in a fiery dawn. Rendered in a ravishing vermillion marble, it juxtaposes the palpable weight and solidity of stone with the plush and pillowy form of a cloud. Just as things are reversed in the mirror-world of Through the Looking-Glass, this cloud is grounded. In fact, all Cattaneo’s work suggests inversions—of up and down, hard and soft, heavy and light, dark and luminous, amorphous and fixed, ephemeral and enduring. To attempt to contain one of Cattaneo’s sculptural design pieces within a single reading is to miss its essential pleasure. Contradiction, double entendre, puns, and palindromes form the eddies and countercurrents in which her work moves.

Above the coffee table cloud, a plantlike form is unfurling downwards from the ceiling. A verdigris bronze vine extends three tendrils terminating in luminous lobes. It is sinuous and elegant, yet slightly sinister.

The chandelier is echoed by a table lamp composed of a snaking tendril. It coils and rises up to suspend a magmatic dewdrop—an illuminated jewel of sommerso glass that creates a dazzling visual effect: the layers of curved glass magnify and enhance each other around the lighted core.

Framing the entrance to the drawing room, two sconces reprise the same form language of tendrils and orbs. Adding yet another inflection to the series—they summon to mind the craned necks of swans. Just beyond them, as a kind of unifying work drawing together the cloud motif and the viney lifeforms, a floor lamp grows upwards in bronze stalk, terminating in a glass cloud-blossom. Against a near wall is an improbably massive stone form. Ominously dark, it looks like an ocean stormcloud. It is, in fact, the basin of a sink. One pours water into the cloud from a bronze faucet, as though building up its store of potential power.

Across from it sits a luminous onyx side table, which also supplies the form to the castle in the chess set at the drawing room’s entrance.

No Looking-Glass exhibition could be complete without a mirror. Above the sink, three illuminated cotton-ball-like onyx clouds frame its reflective surface, blurring the boundary between solid form and atmospheric illusion.

All of this is made more surreal by the virtuosic quality of the craft with which it has been created—the outcome of a multi-year collaboration between Cattaneo and Italian artisans. Her work with the quarry at Carrara and glassblowers in Venice has been particularly fruitful.

As in her 2024 Venice exhibition at Lo Studio, where the artist created works in dialogue with the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim, Cattaneo has braided iconic symbolism with literary influences, personal history, and geographic context. Harrison’s townhouse, built just a decade after Through the Looking-Glass was written, offers its own historical mirror. Passing through it into a mood of nostalgic reverie, Cattaneo conjures a grand Victorian romance—material opulence shot through with ludic fantasy.