The Future of the Past: An Exhibition of Works by Rafael Prieto — Rafael Prieto

New York, New York – Emma Scully Gallery is proud to announce The Future of the Past, a solo exhibition by artist and designer Rafael Prieto. The show will open on September 30, 2026 and remain on view through December 12th.

This is Prieto’s second exhibition with the gallery and explores capturing the historic while looking to the future. It takes as its starting point a series of architectural fragments salvaged from an early twentieth-century building in Tribeca. Located across from Prieto’s studio, the building was undergoing an extensive renovation during which decorative elements were gradually removed from its facade. In total sixteen pieces in varying ornament were ultimately slated to be discarded. Prieto became deeply interested in the fragments and arranged to have them preserved, bringing them back to his studio, where they remained for the next year and a half as he digested and considered their history, meaning, and potential.

For Prieto, the fragments became a way of thinking about New York itself: a city built and rebuilt across time, with its architecture reflecting the many cultures, periods, and aesthetic languages that have shaped it. The intricate details and craftsmanship of the original building provided a record of that history, while their removal raised questions around preservation, erasure, and what happens to the physical remnants of the past – and how those can be carried into the future.

The Future of the Past transforms these ideas into a new body of furniture and sculptural works. Prieto abstracted details and decorative elements from the salvaged architecture, translating them into contemporary forms. Some works retain the original stone, while others use the fragments merely as a point of reference. The resulting pieces lie between functional furniture — including side tables, coffee tables, and a chair — and more sculptural objects.

Four works in the exhibition incorporate the original architectural stone, while the remaining pieces interpret its forms through new materials. In this way, the salvaged fragments become both physical artifacts and conceptual references: traces of a particular building that have been removed from their original context and given another life.

The work also marks a departure for Prieto in his use of color and surface. Lacquered wood appears in deep red, dark purple, and black, introducing a sense of softness, depth, and sensuality that contrasts with the roughness and weight of the stone. The dichotomy between these materials – the hard and the soft, the historic and the contemporary – runs throughout the collection.

Rather than treating preservation as a static act, with this collection Prieto considers what it might mean to carry the past forward. The works retain a connection to their origins while deliberately pushing toward something new, suggesting that history can be preserved not only by maintaining objects in place, but by allowing them to evolve.

Complementing this body of work, the walls of the gallery will be adorned with a collaboration between Prieto and Wallpaper Projects, the boutique design studio specializing in custom-made, custom-fit, high-end wallpaper and fabric-based wall coverings. The design brings his analog photography into immersive scenic environments where the images become portals, expanding depth, shifting perspective, and enveloping each room with a sense of place.

Following the opening, the gallery will be open to the public on Wednesday - Saturday from October 1st through December 12th, with additional viewings available by appointment.

About Rafael Prieto

Originally from Mexico and living and working in New York City, Rafael Prieto is a designer and creative director whose practice moves fluidly across spatial concepts, objects, and experiences. Resisting categorical boundaries, his work finds coherence through a sustained attention to context, material, and cultural specificity. His practice turns toward the poetic residues of everyday life – laundry suspended between buildings, weathered surfaces, temporary arrangements, and subtle gestures that evoke human presence long after the figure has departed. These fragments become a way of considering memory not as a fixed repository of facts, but as an active process of reconstruction, in which sensations, impressions, and experiences continually shift in relation to the present. The work holds space for what has been experienced and what remains unresolved, finding meaning in the ephemeral traces through which everyday life leaves its deepest impressions.

His installation work has been presented at the Serpentine, the Judd Foundation, Villa Necchi Campiglio, and Manitoga, the home and landscape of designer Russel Wright. Recent exhibitions include Galerie Sardine Then, Where; Emma Scully Gallery, New York; and St. Vincent’s, Antwerp.

In parallel, he has developed Marrow, a lighting design studio navigating the threshold between function and sculpture. Through Marrow, he has participated in collectible design exhibitions including lamb Gallery in London; Sized: Industrialism in the West Village; and MASA’s Intervención / Intersección at Rockefeller Center.

About Emma Scully Gallery

Located in a 19th Century townhouse on the Upper East Side, Emma Scully Gallery presents thought-provoking, contemporary works that aim to answer the question of how design can gracefully move forward in today’s material society facing super abundance, the ecological cost of overproduction and the shift from the physical to the digital world. A balance of established greats, undiscovered talents, and collaborative commissions, the gallery’s conceptual programming is academically curated by EmmaScully, a creative professional well-versed in art history, design, and decorative art.