Even before shuttering his eponymous gallery in SoHo this year, design maven Murray Moss has made it abundantly clear he wouldn’t miss the shop at all (“Things get stale,” were his exact words). When its doors closed in February, he launched the Moss Bureau consultancy firm in its stead, the duties of which have included flying to Paris to remerchandise the crystal collections of Baccarat, and temporarily living inside Vienna’s MAK Museum while discussing a potential show there. His latest project, the recently opened Phillips de Pury exhibition and sale entitled “Moss: Dialogues Between Art & Design,” seems like a grand continuation of what he set out to do when he opened his gallery 18 years ago: to elevate popular perceptions of design to the level of fine art.

Defying all auction house conventional wisdom, Moss has put together a show that combines pieces traditionally segregated under the labels “art” and “design.” Pulling from his own venerable collection — pieces by Gaetano Pesce, Hella Jongerius, and Studio Job, for example — he’s paired functional objects with various blue-chip artworks to create thought-provoking vignettes. With the help of close friend and art mega-collector Asher Edelman, the curatorial process went as follows: the two selected pieces from their respective design and art vaults they thought would complement each other in previously unexplored ways. In the immaculate study of his Midtown apartment, where a 1969 Ettore Sottsass “Valentine” typewriter hangs on the wall like a canvas, Moss printed out potential lots, cut them out, and arranged them in pairs like paper dolls. The point of he sought to make was that auctions, though traditionally very homogenized, don’t need to be so categorical, and that art and design are capable of more fluid interactions. The result: a 124-piece sale unprecedented in scope. 

“There is work that superficially looks connected, but in fact isn’t, and work which isn’t so obviously connected at first, but if you look hard, and you think hard about it, you can find profound connections,” he told us more during a walkthrough of the show, now on view at Phillips de Pury through October 15.

Stepping past the taxidermied emu — adorned with a crown and procession of golden insects, it regally welcomes you into the exhibition — visitors can immediately see two examples. Along the wall, a functioning, circa-1850 grandfather clock singed black as part of Baas’s “Where There’s Smoke” series (2006) chimes next to Louise Nevelson’s “Cascades Perpendicular XX” (1980-1982), a rectangular pillar of painted black wood with a circular embellishment fixed to the front.

“They look almost separated at birth — fraternal, at least,” said Moss. He compared them to Diane Arbus’s famous “Identical Twins”: “You know that they are individuals, you know they are not the same person, yet we make the leap assuming that they’re interchangeable because they look so similar.” Separated by decades, their obvious resemblance wasn’t apparent to us until now.

Conversely, the seemingly disparate “Ceiling Plan for the Red Theater” by Kasimir Malevich and the illuminated shelves of Gio Ponti’s 1950 brass, mahogany, and glass wall organizer hang together nearby. Positioned together just so, we can see their  similar themes of geometry and negative space. But further, because the Ponti piece is hung on the wall like an artwork, and the Malevich piece is a drawing of a ceiling he proposed for Soviet Russia’s Krasny Theatre, their juxtaposition questions which of them we should consider “art,” which we should consider “design,” and whether those labels are actually relevant.  

Upstairs, the vignettes take on more playful themes in a room filled with colorful objects, which we would normally relate to as children’s toys. Compared to the staid classics of mostly neutral colors on the floor below, we can consider this section the playroom of the auction house: A Campana Brothers banquette fashioned from stuffed panda bears sits under an ink-and-paper by Henri Michaux. The repeating black and white inkblots suggest a visual relationship, but it’s just a purposeful Rorschach-like deception. Elsewhere, Pavel Filonov watercolors depict animals stripped down to their bare geometric essentials, lines joined at sharp angles. Arranged on makeshift mantle below it, Cathy McClure’s “Bots” are toy animals that have been stripped to their bare essentials with scissors; the resulting frameworks, skinned of their plush coats, were cast in bronze and turned into freaky figureines that, when wound up, still oink, cluck, wag their tails, and waddle. In both reductions, only un-cuddly skeletons remain.

Although the lots in the Moss sale are to be sold separately, their curation and arrangement at Phillips is quintessentially Murray. Illuminated by imagined narratives, the combinations make a larger point that design, oft-perceived as art’s lesser cousin, can rest on the same pedestal, and that the two need not be compartmentalized. “It’s an interdisciplinary kind of approach which is terribly lacking with the way we’re presented art and design by our cultural institutions,” Moss said. Sitting beneath Alberto Giacometti's  “Torse de Femme” (1948-1949), a hand-sculpted Baas table continues to be “a table you could put a bowl of spaghetti on,” but it's one that can stand up next a work by a blue-chip, modernist Swiss sculptor. “You can find the impulse to sculpt in someone making a dress, a wedding cake, a table, an abstract sculpture, which is what I believe. It doesn’t have to be what you think it is.”

While the difference in estimates of the respective art and design works still speak to latter’s institutional segregation (the Baas rings up at $40,000-$60,000, Giacometti $2 to $3 million), the sparks that ignite when their two disciplines collide are what Moss calls a tertium quid — a “third thing,” greater than the sum of its parts.

The auction takes place at Phillips de Pury on October 16. To see highlights, click the slide show .