A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week was, weirdly, all about fruit (perhaps it’s the influence of the unstoppable pineapple?). We also said a (temporary) goodbye to a beloved New York retailer and a hello to the best Ikea collection in years.

Links

If you’ve never worked at a publication before, you might not realize the effort that goes into choosing which image might appeal to your readers most. (We, of course, are real scientific over here about what you guys will click on, i.e. squiggles, cats, and plants.) Luckily, one of our favorite reads, It’s Nice That, gave us a behind-the-scenes peek at how they arrived at the cover image for their new printed edition, Printed Pages. It was the pub’s first-ever photographic cover, and they knew they had to get it right. But neither the strawberries here or the teal-background one at the top of this post made the cut! Click here to see what did. If you read articles on the Internet, you’ve probably already seen these classic Vans printed with Magritte’s Surrealist paintings, which will be released by Opening Ceremony later this spring. They’re available for pre-order until March 17.The other piece of weird wearable art that arrived in our inboxes this week was even more esoteric: sweatshirts, scarves and the like for Acne printed with the works of a once-forgotten Swedish painter named Hilma Af Klint, whose early-20th-century abstract paintings were “informed by her studies in mysticism and the occult.”But back to our regularly scheduled program of geometric furniture and amazing ceramics. These great Scorpion Pots by a designer of both — Sight Unseen favorite Peter Shire — are having an exhibition at the LA shop South Willard through April 11. If you never got a chance to read our interview with Shire in Paper View, there’s an excellent oral history printed on the shop’s blog.

Discoveries

Having once briefly contemplated writing a Marc Newson monograph, we kind of thought we’d seen all of the Australian designer’s earliest work. But we’d have remembered this one-of-a-kind Prototype Chair, which Newson fabricated in 1983 while studying at Sydney College of the Arts. The steel and aluminum chair — now selling for $150,000 at Sebastian + Barquet — popped up on L’Arcobaleno this week.  
One of our favorite discoveries this week came from a tip-off on Freunde Von Freunden‘s Instagram: Fruit of the Loom recently introduced a premium line of loungy clothes called Seek No Further, available at twin pop-ups in London and Berlin. For the Berlin outpost on Torstrasse, Sarah Illenberger created these large-scale fruit sculptures above. Seek No Further also has an excellent fruit-throughout-the-ages-themed Instagram! 
Can we all agree that this rug is one of the best things to come out of Ikea in years? Their whole 2014 PS collection, which was revealed this week and caters “to young urbanites who live in smaller, compact spaces,” is really great and includes contributions from some of our favorite designers, like Tomás Alonso, Rich Brilliant Willing, and Scholten & Baijings. Now can we please get it in New York?Lastly, we were tipped off this week to a new collection of vases by Elyse Graham, whose geodes we featured a while back. Inspired by the color textures of celestial bodies, each vase is hand-cast inside a balloon using hydrocal plaster and then dip-dyed in custom-mixed pigments. The absorption of the dye depends on the thickness of the plaster, which gives the vases their varying color. The interior of each vase is coated in layers of resin, which when allowed to drip out the mouth of the vase creates what Graham calls that “stalagmite effect.”

Exhibitions
One of the most promising exhibitions to open this week is a sculpture show at New York’s Jewish Museum. Called “Other Primary Structures,” the show revisits the premise of a 1966 exhibition called “Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors,” which introduced artists like Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt. This exhibition will cast a more global net, with pieces from Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, much of which has rarely been seen in the United States.

We were introduced to the work of Rebecca Morris at the Whitney Biennial last week, and now we learned that the Los Angeles-based painter has a solo show that opened this week at LAXART. Called Fantastic LA, after a song by The Doors, “these abstract canvases function as compositions recorded in layers to produce a unified whole. The paintings begin with a minimal motif around the edges of the work. As a signature repeated throughout, getting denser towards the middle of the arrangement, a succession of marks applied to the canvas weave together like chord arpeggios meeting in a crescendo.” The show also features the best exhibition note ever: “This exhibition is accompanied by a billboard on La Cienega Boulevard depicting Morris’ cats (on La Cienega, between Venice and Washington Boulevards).”

Instagrams

We kind of don’t know how Eric Trine does it. Every time we talk to the now Long Beach, California–based designer, he’s working on a dozen projects at once, and the dude has an under-1 infant at home. But we want the projects to keep coming! These sculptural way-too-cool-to-be-coatstands are a preview of Trine’s next Alley-Oop collaboration with Portland-based designer Will Bryant.

And the most tear-inducing photo on Instagram this week came from Kiosk, Alisa Grifo and Marco Romeny’s beloved everyday objects purveyor, whose second-floor Soho shop (and onetime Sight Unseen offices!) are set to be torn down and replaced by a six-story commercial and retail building. Saturday night the couple threw one last goodbye bash in the space before they move the shop to Union Square. Goodbye 95 Spring Street! We’ll miss you!