04.24.15

Eye Candy

e7’s Zinc Project Was One of This Year’s Salone Satellite Standouts

Our last bit of Milan coverage this week comes from a brand-new design studio comprised of three ECAL grads — Giulia Chéhab from Italy, Micael Filipe from Portugal and Romain Viricel from France — whose Zinc Project caught our eye in the very last row of this year's Salone Satellite. A table and shelf series made from galvanized zinc, the project was inspired by the aesthetic irregularities that arise from the galvanization process.

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04.07.15

Eye Candy

Forma Anticum

Part of the joy we take in creating content for Sight Unseen every day is the delight we get from telling the stories behind the makers and the images we publish. But what happens when there is literally no story to be found? That's exactly the position we found ourselves in the other day when we stumbled across these images on Pinterest.

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04.03.15

Eye Candy

Lauren Clay, Artist

Artist Lauren Clay has a background in painting and printmaking, but her work is hardly confined to the two-dimensional plane. Her body of work began as a series of large paintings on paper. But as she progressed, she became more and more interested in the inherent tendencies of paper to curl away from the wall, and she began to explore the third dimension, bridging the gap between painting and sculpture. We can see this in her delicate cut-out grids on marbled acrylic paper, which naturally curl away from the wall, creating a presence in the viewer's space and a dialogue between paper and wall, paper and viewer, and 2D vs. 3D.

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03.31.15

Eye Candy

Acme Releases Deadstock Memphis Objects

It was only a week and a half ago that we reported on a cache of original, made-in-the-80s Memphis jewelry designs that the brand ACME has spent the past few months pulling from its archives and posting for sale on its Legacy website (where it appears that even more designs, particularly those by Peter Shire, have since been added). But we had to come in for round two today when we found out that, just this morning, Acme unleashed the motherlode: actual objects, long unavailable and highly rarefied, by the likes of Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi, and Aldo Rossi. Many of them are original prototypes, some of them are one-of-a-kind, and none of them were ever put into mass production. We've posted a selection of the offerings after the jump, along with the bits of history provided by ACME — get them before the collectors do!

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03.24.15

Eye Candy

B-FIT Assemblage by Fact Non Fact

B-FIT, a project by the Seoul-based design collective Fact Non Fact, is the very definition of eye candy — the geometric shapes it comprises are meant not to function in specific ways, but merely to look pretty and highlight the materials they're made from, which include iron, brass, plaster, terra cotta, marble, wood, glass and concrete. If "A-FIT," according to Fact Non Fact, refers to all the objects in our lives that are optimized for specific functions, like chairs or door handles, "B-FIT" refers to the kinds of objects that aren't. After making the pieces, designers Jinsik Kim, Yuhun Kim, and Eunjae Lee brought them to life in three ways: as a physical installation, as a conceptual deskscape, and as the Assemblage images you see here.

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03.20.15

Eye Candy

In a Philly Photographer’s Hands, Photos That Look Like Digital Collages

We've been familiar with Philadelphia-based photographer Roxana Azar's work for some time now (last summer, she took the snaps for our story on fellow Philadelphian Page Neal of Bario-Neal (where Azar also works). But the second she sent us the latest personal series she's been working on, we knew we had to share. Azar digitally manipulates her photos to make them almost painterly or collage-like, but in the series we're sharing today, many of the images began as photographs from gardens where Azar spent her childhood. "I am really interested in using the photograph as a starting point to layer, erase, rebuild, and obscure an image, turning the image into something ambiguous yet playful," Azar says.

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03.13.15

Eye Candy

Ivin Ballen, Artist

We love an artist who can successfully blur the line between sculpture and painting, and Brooklyn-based Ivin Ballen is certainly no exception. Upon first viewing his work, you perceive a few colored shapes (some rectilinear, others more organic) haphazardly arranged on a vast backdrop. Upon closer inspection, you begin to notice those colored shapes are an assemblage of found materials, and that, in fact, those found materials are simply just painted casts of the originals.

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03.05.15

Eye Candy

Still Lifes by Belgian Photographer Frederik Vercruysse

Still life photography is having a big week on Sight Unseen — yesterday we featured a pair of stylists who built their reputation on it and are now moving into interiors, and today we're highlighting a photographer who approaches shooting interiors just as though they were still lifes. Belgian-born talent Frederik Vercruysse, in fact, describes his entire body of work as "still life photography in the broadest sense of the word," according to his website, applying the approach not just to interiors but to portraits, fashion shows, and the occasional landscape as well (for clients like Wallpaper magazine, Sophie Buhai, and Muller Van Severen). But then, of course, there are his actual still lifes, which we've decided to focus on here. Shot mostly for magazines, they represent the purest form of his aim "to photograph the subject in its purest form."

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02.24.15

Eye Candy

Meet the Baltimore-Based Artist Making Abstract Art from Yoga Mats

Balance balls, dumbbells, pool noodles — is the recent incorporation of exercise equipment into the visual arts part and parcel with normcore or is it something more? The latest adherent to the trend is Baltimore-based artist Alex Ebstein, who works with a variety of materials — most notably yoga mats — but in Ebstein's hands, those basic materials become less trendy and more textural. Her brightly colored canvases resemble something Matisse may have constructed had his cut-out phase occurred during the Memphis movement.

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02.16.15

Eye Candy

Valentin Dommanget, Artist

Like most visually inclined folks his age, 25-year-old French artist Valentin Dommanget — who studied fashion as an undergrad before receiving his MFA at Central Saint Martins last spring — grew up with a steady diet of internet art. Having internalized a certain digital aesthetic that embraces all things geological and hypercolor, natural yet unnatural, he created a series of paintings that take those virtual influences and represent them through actual real-world handicraft, pairing paint-marbled canvases with torqued stretchers that mimic some kind of Photoshop rotation effect. Pictured above and below are selections from that series, plus other pieces that apply the same techniques to concrete tables, paper books, framed canvases, and crooked canvases that appear balanced atop geometric plywood cutouts.

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02.06.15

Eye Candy

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s Steel Curtains

We first caught sight of one of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's colorful curtains at Esther Schipper gallery's booth at Frieze New York last year, where we couldn't stop taking pictures of how nicely it framed the crowds rushing by on the other side. But we'd forgotten all about the Spanish-born, Brazilian-based artist until more of those curtains popped up on Sight Unseen contributor Su Wu's blog I'm Revolting last week. Steegmann appears to have a very philosophically rich practice, full of meshes and grids and insect forms that reference Brazilian oil laborers and the writings of Roger Caillois, but the curtains, from what we can tell, are pure formalism, and the best kind — they completely transform your experience of a space. They curtains themselves are made from steel mesh and produced by a Spanish interiors company called KriskaDecor, but with geometric cutouts lined in laser-cut and powder-coated steel frames.

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01.29.15

Eye Candy

Elizabeth Atterbury, Artist

While the Maine-based artist Elizabeth Atterbury has done amazing things with just simple shapes cut into paper and steel, lately she's been getting a wee bit more ambitious — building a 3-by-4-foot sandbox in her studio and photographing compositions she's raked into it, or using a bandsaw to carve grill bricks into arcs and zigzags then documenting the crumbly results. Aside from photography — which she studied in school — she also exhibits sculptures in clay and painted wood. You can see them in person now through May 10 at Colby College Art Museum in Waterville, Maine, or pick up a copy of Atterbury's 2013 book with Bodega gallery, "In the Middle, an Oasis."

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