Week of July 3, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: velvet-clad walls at the Vienna Secession, 3-D artworks having a moment, and, for good measure, Scandinavian paper porn.
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See Sabine Marcelis’s Real-Life Version of Mondrian’s Most Famous Painting

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the launch of Theo Van Doesburg's seminal magazine, De Stijl, in 1917, and Rotterdam-based designer Sabine Marcelis recently helped carve out a space at the Cannes Film Festival to honor the art and design movement that adopted its name. For the festival's Dutch Pavilion, Marcelis brought to life Mondrian's famed 1935 painting "Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow" by building a 3-D framework of black lines inset with gradient glass panels, then punctuating it with primary colored versions of her signature Voie Lights and Candy Cubes.
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Nine New Mirrors We Love, On View at a Swiss Gallery

For the Lausanne gallery MOBILAB — which also does triple duty as part laboratory, part shop —the latest theme of works is “Face / Surface,” which entails a wild exploration of mirrors by nine designers, craftsmen, and artists. The varying concepts of reflection range from hanging balloon-like chandeliers by glassmaker and artist Matteo Gonet to quasi-circular, blue-hued shapes inspired by lunar cycles from Swiss designer Adrien Rovero.
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Week of June 26, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: furniture inspired by Judd and Noguchi, a peek into Portland's seriously impressive retail scene, and a new collaboration between a Dutch textile designer and a happy housewares store, above.
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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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Six Talents to Watch from RCA’s 2017 Graduate Show

Despite continued uncertainty about the effect Brexit might have on applications from students abroad, this year’s Royal College of Art graduate show was a celebration of global design talent, showcasing some of the best emerging talents from the EU and beyond. Here are six of our favorites.
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This Heath Ceramics Alum Just Made the Chicest Salt Lamp We’ve Ever Seen

A little more than a decade ago, when Christina Zamora was just an art-school grad living in the Bay Area, she landed a job that would go on to inform her life and her practice in immeasurable ways: She became a designer for Heath Ceramics, the midcentury California pottery brand whose early-2000s revival coincided with Zamora's tenure there. "I was surrounded by her way of thinking and working every single day. This experience had a profound impact on how I approach design." That becomes clear from the moment you encounter the first product made by Zamora's year-old, Oakland-based studio, Brave Matter.
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Ana Kras Natalie Weinberger

Ana Kras and Natalie Weinberger’s Powerhouse Collab at Picture Room

On view through August 20th at Brooklyn’s Picture Room, Family pairs pencil drawings by artist and designer Ana Kraš with stacked stoneware sculptures — each comprised of a set of functional vessels wheel-thrown by Brooklyn ceramicist Natalie Weinberger — in an exploration of emotional interplay between inanimate objects. “We started calling each set a family,” Weinberger says, “because we’re working with separate figures that share an emotional attachment.”
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Buy These Curated Arrangements from Daniela Jacobs, Queen of the Still Life

Daniela Jacobs sees the world through the lens of the still life — something that's instantly obvious with a scroll through her Instagram page, where her beautifully shaped and textured ceramics are placed in and among the best props and treasures. So when her latest collection of shoppable still lifes, called ARC Accents, came about, it had evolved over years of accumulation and a love for secondhand items. “I didn't want to start a secondhand shop, but rather a curated collection of pieces, both found and of my own design.”
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Week of June 19, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the best of Design Miami/Basel, the debut production run of German Ermics's much-coveted ombre mirrors, and the first Milan flagship for Acne, complete with pink ceiling and interior arches — so on trend.
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The Cool Girl Cape Town Jewelry Brand At the Top of Our Wish List

Called Waif, the line is a labor of love by former ad woman and self-taught jewelry designer Gisele Human, who we've been assiduously following on Instagram, waiting for news of a new collection to drop. We got our wish this week when Human unveiled her Technicolor Melodrama collection, in which many pieces mix Human's signature metals with stones like malachite, sodalite, and Dalmatian jasper.
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