The Matisse- and Picasso-Inspired Danish Artist On the Brink of Stardom

It’s hard not to look at Christiane Spangsberg’s paintings as a cross between Matisse and Picasso, but when you start really exploring the simplicity of the lines, the additions of a lilac or pink or teal, and the titles of the works — they become so much more. The Copenhagen-based artist has found a way to explore the perception of people in their daily and digital lives through her emotive portraits.
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You’ll Never Guess Which European Metropolis Inspired Svenja Deininger’s Latest Body of Work

Sometimes the reason you are drawn to one piece of art or another is obvious. In the case of Viennese artist Svenja Deininger — who opens "Crescendo," her third solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, this Thursday — we could say it is because her work falls somewhere pleasingly on the spectrum between figurative and abstract. At its most abstract, it resembles the color-field painters we espouse so heartily on this site; at its most figurative, there is something almost Hockney-esque about her canvases. But sometimes the reason you are drawn to one piece of art or another reveals itself to you only later.
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Seven Designers Spent the Summer at an Italian Palazzo. Here Are the Results.

It would be a dream brief in any creative field: Set up shop in a 13th-century palazzo at the foot of the Italian Alps with a group of friends, and see what comes of it. And yet that's exactly what Étage Projects founder Maria Foerlev offered to her stable of designers this summer, inviting seven contemporary design practices to Palazzo Monti, an artist's residency program and creativity incubator.
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In the Neighborhood — A Showcase of Local and International Design — is LDF’s Breakout Exhibition

We'll be featuring our favorite new launches from the London Design Festival next week, but judging by our Instagram, the most popular exhibition features hardly any new work at all: In the Neighbourhood is a pop-up exhibition curated by friends and neighbors, interior designer Louisa Grey and The School of Life founder Morgwn Rimel. The conceit? Two different houses organized by palette.
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Pattern for Yemen affordable artist editions

Buying One of These Affordable Artist Editions Will Go to Help a Major Humanitarian Crisis

Pattern for Yemen, an initiative to raise money for the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, was organized by Melbourne's A Friend of Mine and The Souvenir Society, who asked 15 major artists to create an artwork on cloth in an edition of 50 — a wash of green ink from Ronan Bouroullec, an exploded geometry by Nathalie Du Pasquier, colorful grids by Darkroom designer Rhonda Drakeford, a blocky composition by Michael Wall, and more.
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LDF Preview: The Online Design Gallery Redefining “Nordic”

For Now Nordic, Adorno invited curators from Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Reykjavik and Oslo to assemble a collection from 5-7 designers working at the intersection of art, design, and craft. The point of the exhibition was to explore whether the label "Nordic" — or what the organizers call "design-world shorthand" for clean lines, natural materials, simplicity and functionality — can meaningfully describe an aesthetic or if lumping designs from different countries together actually does each of them a disservice.
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14 Up-and-Coming American Designers, In a Show Curated By One of Their Own

As people whose job it is to track emerging designers — particularly those on the American scene — it's rare that we walk into a show to find incredible work by a roster of relative unknowns. And yet that's exactly what happened when I rolled up to Fernando Mastrangelo's studio in deep (deep) Brooklyn last Friday night for the opening party of In Good Company: Material Culture. It's the second exhibition Mastrangelo has curated in his space — this time alongside Architectural Digest's senior design writer Hannah Martin.
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LDF 2018 Preview: A Spotlight on Uruguayan Designers

It's nestled directly between Brazil and Buenos Aires, but you don't hear a whole lot about Uruguay in this part of the world. A new exhibition launching during the London Design Festival next week, though, is set to change that: Hilos Invisibles at Aram Gallery will give seven Montevideo studios a platform to present themselves on the global design scene, and the London-based but Uruguayan-born designer Matteo Fogale has helped groom them for their debut.
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Kueng Caputo’s Kaleidoscopic New Furniture, On View in Copenhagen

Since the beginning of their practice, the Swiss duo Kueng Caputo have been obsessed with what happens when colorful particulate matter is somehow fused together. After all, their first, attention-grabbing project was a series of chairs in which pigmented sand and mortar were hardened in a mold and then chiseled into shape. Their newest works, currently on view at Copenhagen's Étage Projects in a exhibition called Ciao Amico Mio, follow in that same vein.
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