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Lauren Rottet Creates Solo Museum Exhibition for Artist Bobby Anspach
June 29,
2025 by Karen Parrish in Business Strategy, Industry 
With the opening timed to Newport Design Week, the Restorative Space is inspired by Anspach’s meditative and connective works, exploring transformation, reflection, and the intimate relationship between object and observer.
Commissioned by the Newport Art Museum as an extension of Anspach’s meditative world, the Restorative Space is designed to provide a space for reflection before and after visitors experience Anspach’s immersive installations, which use carefully crafted optical and lighting effects to create an altered perception of space and time, immersing participants in a heightened state of connection. Rottet’s Restorative Space is designed to facilitate a sense of presence before or after this experience, embodying her holistic design approach—one that blurs the boundaries between art, architecture, and emotional experience.
At the heart of both Lauren Rottet’s and Bobby Anspach’s work lies a shared ethos: to create spaces—both physical and emotional—that foster connection and reflection. Rottet’s restorative space, conceived for Everything is Change, brings the calm and coherence of the natural world indoors. It offers visitors a chance to pause, recalibrate, and experience the stillness so often missing in contemporary life. Influenced by the Light and Space movement, Rottet carefully orchestrates materiality, form, and illumination to animate the environment with subtle visual shifts and layered symbolism. Her design becomes a vessel for presence—a space to return to the self.
Similarly, Anspach’s work is born from a desire to cultivate empathy—for oneself, for others, and for the environment. His sculptures evoke impermanence and interconnection, encouraging a gentle awareness of how we inhabit space and how space, in turn, shapes us. Together, their work forms a dialogue about care—care for our surroundings, for our relationships, and for our interior landscapes.
“I was moved by Bobby Anspach’s quest for people to see themselves and the world through constant eye contact, altering their perception and perhaps opening their minds. In creating a space for relaxation and contemplation before and after experiencing his works, I thought about my physician father and his constant teaching of mind over matter—basically the theory of relativity—that matter, and energy are interchangeable, just different forms of the same thing. I had heard stories about patients who were healed based on the intense power of thought and medicines from nature,” noted Lauren Rottet.
“Contemplating the installation, I realized that my design explorations for many years have been about emulating nature within the interior environment to make one feel as comfortable and relaxed inside as they do outside, believing in and harnessing the power of the mind for well-being."
Located adjacent to the Everything is Change exhibition and within the Museum’s historic John N.A. Griswold House, the room invites stillness and sensory immersion. Designed to offer both visual intrigue and emotional ease, it features signature pieces from the Rottet Collection, including the Cubist Curve Sofa, Dark and Stormy Tables, and multiple iterations of her Wood Float Chairs—each combining minimalist geometry with tactile warmth.
A new 3D-printed Petite Wood Float Chair takes center stage, reinterpreting the original in a fluid, fabric-like silhouette that mimics movement in static form. The room’s ambient palette—light cream and slate—enhances this sense of quietude, while soft rugs designed in collaboration with Sacco Carpet ground the experience and two chairs designed by Kristina Tjäder from Hyfer Objects form a window seating area. Works by Anspach surround the viewer in a layered meditation on interiority, in addition to a custom soundscape by composer Eluvium adding an aural dimension to the installation, deepening the sense of transport.
Central to the space are Rottet’s Split Face Planters, hybrid sculptural vessels designed to offer a mirror to the self and to nature. Rather than being filled by plants, they are filled with objects of deeper meaning—one filled with colorful yarn that nods to Anspach’s practice and the connective threads between us all, and the other with 100,000 pennies that visitors are invited to take or add, encouraging interaction and reflection on what we exchange between us and the shared meanings of our social contract, “The Nature of Choice.”
The exhibition is on view June 21-September 28, 2025.
Rottet Collection can also be viewed at the Rottet Collection Showroom, 29 West 30th St., 6th Floor, New York, NY. For appointments or to order, call 1-866-400-4777 or email orders@rottetcollection.com. www.rottetcollection.com.