Murals Reign At This Exhibition in the South of France, Celebrating Centuries-Old Craft Techniques

Antique-Rustique is an immersive experience and the furniture and decorative sculptures are best viewed in situ among the murals painted directly onto the walls at a mano studio, a gallery in Biarritz, France. For the layout, designers Bella Hunt & DDC imagined a walk amongst ancient ruins lost in a forest. “Our work is a tribute to the history of art and the fluidity of time,” they write.
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Charlotte Kidger’s Crumbling Columns, Made From Foam Dust, Are Perfect For This Moment in Time

In April, just as the world was beginning to shut down, Central St Martin's grad Charlotte Kidger got a phone call from Browns Fashion in London, who wanted her to create a window display for the store's flagship on South Molton Street. Four months and 19 sculptures later, Kidger's work is on view until September 7, highlighting the store's iconic accessories collection.
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A New Independent Design Label Launches in the South of France

The tiny town of Hyères in the South of France is only 50 square miles, but has long had an outsized presence on the contemporary design map as the home of the arts foundation Villa Noailles and its annual Design Parade festival. The festival was canceled this year due to the pandemic — more on that next week! — but two young Parisians have managed to fill in the gap with an exhibition called Été Super, which is serving as the launch of their independent design brand 13Desserts and its permanent showroom in a former Hyères skate shop.
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At Villa Cavrois, Muller Van Severen is an Eerily Perfect Match for the Modernist Estate

This month, the Belgian design duo Muller Van Severen begin a four-month intervention at Villa Cavrois, the modernist French estate designed in the late 1920s by Robert Mallet-Stevens. The show is a retrospective of sorts for the husband-and-wife duo, featuring everything from their leather-and-steel Duo Seats to brand-new work like the Alltubes series they launched this spring with Valerie Traan at Collectible and a sofa they've designed specifically in response to the installation site.
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A Match Made in Murano — Mattia Bonetti Fuses with Famed Glassmakers for His Latest Collection

As often as Swiss-born, Paris-based Mattia Bonetti’s singular, one-of-a-kind furniture and design pieces are described as whimsical, it would make sense that they are created, well, on a whim. The designer doesn’t release work in cohesive collections, preferring to design fantastical one-off pieces whenever inspiration strikes. Bonetti’s newest pieces, handmade in collaboration with the famed glass artisans of Murano, Italy and presented by London gallery David Gill in an online exhibition, is surprisingly subdued but no less virtuosic.
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Furniture Inspired by an Architectural Jewel of the Mediterranean

This month, a special exhibition at Gagosian’s Davies Street gallery in London will see the space arranged to resemble Casa Malaparte’s main room, a stone-floored space with ocean vistas that features in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film, Contempt. Tommaso Rositani Suckert, Malaparte’s youngest descendant, has produced editions of three of the most iconic furniture pieces from Casa Malaparte for the exhibition: a table, a bench, and a console, all manufactured in Italy and comprised of solid walnut, pine, Carrara marble, and stone.
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Katie Stout and the Subversion of American Craft

In her latest solo exhibition at Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami, called Sour Tasting Liquid, Katie Stout focuses her experiments exclusively in ceramics, exploring processes like slab-building, mosaic, pinching, kintsugi, and more to make a body of work that is at once figurative and abstract, logical and absurd.
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This Barcelona Studio Asked a Painter to Choose the Colors of Its New Chair

When Gerrit Rietveld designed his famed Red and Blue Chair in 1917, it wasn't red and blue at all, but plain, unstained beech wood. Only six years later, after his De Stijl collaborator Bart van der Leck suggested he add bright colors, did Rietveld create the version that went on to make history. The same is true, in a way, of the Barcelona studio AOO's Chair 8, whose colors were envisioned by painter Claudia Valsells for a recent collaborative exhibition in Spain.
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