These Tiny, Affordable Nudes Put a Contemporary Spin on a Classical Genre

As NG Collective Studio, sisters Laura Naples and Kristen Giorgi sell their collaborative artworks on Uprise Art, an online gallery representing up and coming talents. That's where we spotted these gestural watercolor Mini Nudes. "I played around with the concept of how, using color and shape, the nude figures could relate to modern elements that we currently see in design and fashion," Giorgi says.
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Matisse-Inspired Prints Marleigh Culver

Matisse-Inspired Prints By a Graphic Designer On the Rise

Much in the way our love for a book is evident in loose binds and worn-out pages, there's a certain value in the way we let beloved things blemish or roughen overtime. The Japanese call this permission of imperfection wabi-sabi — wabi denoting a singular, often uncontrolled uniqueness akin to a flowing streak of paint, and sabi literally meaning "chill" or "withered," which references the beauty of corrosion. Marleigh Culver, a graphic designer at Need Supply by day and visual artist by night, feels a certain kinship with this design approach. "I like sloppy shapes and rough edges, and for my pieces to look like they’ve been moved between houses for generations," Culver says.
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An (Oft-Copied) Still-Life Photographer Shows Us How It’s Done

Packing peanuts, crumpled-up paper, a chic side table tipped on its side — no, it's not your average moving scene of chaos in transit, but rather one of the unexpected, still-life compositions devised by New York–based photographer Joanna McClure. McClure's work often shows up in places like T Magazine or for brands like Loeffler Randall, but her photos walk the line between the commercial and fine art — abstractly subjective, employing everyday materials into thought-provoking scenarios.
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A Wallpaper That Lets You Cover Your Walls With Kaleidoscopic Spraypaint

When the New York design showroom Colony presented new work by its roster of emerging talents during design week this past May, the furniture wasn't the only highlight — several of the space's carefully styled object vignettes were backdropped by rainbows of hyper-color ombre splatter-paint that we zeroed in on immediately, assuming they were an artful site-specific flourish applied by someone who knew their way around a spray can. Not so: They were actually panels of large-scale, non-repeating wallpaper by Brooklyn's Flat Vernacular, in a new pattern called The Heavens.
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Emily Mullin still-life sculptures

Still-Life Sculptures That Blur the Line Between Photography and Art

In its guise as a flower shop, Saffron Brooklyn had already hosted its share of exhibitions over the years, everything from photography by Youngna Park to ceramics by Katy Krantz. So it makes sense that the sister-owned shop would eventually open a gallery of its own: Sunday Takeout, a tiny spot in Fort Greene next door to Saffron, opened in April of this year. On view now, their second-ever exhibition on view now — by Brooklyn-based Emily Mullin (who goes by the studio name Vachina) — in fact bridges both of those mediums, photography and ceramics. Her show spotlights a series of wall-based, still-life sculptures featuring glazed ceramic vessels on painted sheet metal.
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19 Surprisingly Cool Bathroom Interiors

People often refer to the bathroom as the "most overlooked room in the house," but you certainly wouldn't know it judging from our most popular Pinterest board, Interiors: Much to our surprise, some of our most viral Pins ever have been super-designy WCs, from the iridescent-paneled Tom Dixon creation above to an all-pink confection featured recently in our story about Guillermo Santomà's Casa Horta. We pulled 19 of our favorite examples, after the jump.
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A Finnish Textile Designer Who Tossed Out All the Rules of Textile Design

Reeta Ek is one of those fine artists who studied design for practicality's sake, as a way to ensure she'd actually be able to get a job upon graduation. Yet when it came time for her to start her thesis, she gave herself one last taste of freedom, opting to throw out all of textile design's typical rules and restraints and just create whatever pleased her.
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10 New Takes on the Pendant Light, From a Designer Down Under

In the category of cities we're seriously dying to visit, Melbourne is right up there with Tokyo, and now we have another reason to make the trek: the recently wrapped Denfair, a design fair now in its second year, which in the past week has introduced us to whole host of new talents, including the German-born, Melbourne-based designer Volker Haug, whose new lighting collection we're featuring today. Made by hand in Haug's Brunswick East studio, the lights represent a more minimalist direction for the designer, whose previous creations were more colorful and organic.
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The Coolest Glass Chairs Since Kuramata

Guillermo Santoma's interior work shows an acute understanding of things like just how much geometry is enough and how interesting cuts in the architecture can lift a just-great renovation into something otherworldly. Over the past few months, Santomá has released a series of chairs that embody many of those same principles.
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Zuza Mengham resin sculptures

One-Of-a-Kind Resin Sculptures, Whose Fates Are Sealed in an Flash

Most artists and designers start their practices small, then scale up their work as their ambitions, finances, and studio spaces grow. London-based Zuza Mengham has done the opposite: Back in art school, she welded semi-functional steel sculptures so large and unwieldy she sometimes had to destroy them afterwards, while recently she began turning her attention towards resin experiments compact enough to perch on a bookshelf. Both endeavors come from a similar interest in working within the transitional states of materials.
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Jongjin Park layered ceramics

You’ll Never Guess What These Ceramics Are Made From

When you first catch sight of the pieces in South Korean artist Jongjin Park's Artistic Stratum ceramic series, it's almost impossible to tell that they're ceramics at all; their textured, layered surfaces call to mind everything from sponges to unsanded wood. But the pieces were in fact made using a technique Park stumbled upon while researching his Master's thesis at Cardiff University in the UK: By painting clay slip onto pieces of paper towel, layering them, applying pigment and then firing them at 1280 degrees, Park creates a masslike trompe l'oeil.
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