01.18.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Show, Hilda Hellström Blurs the Line Between What is Real and What is Fake

When we first interviewed Swedish designer Hilda Hellström back in 2012, just two weeks after her graduation from London's Royal College of Art, the designer drew an interesting distinction between her work and that of her peers: While so many Hellström's age were obsessed with the properties of different materials, she was more interested in the possibilities of narrative. But a funny thing happened in the five years that have elapsed since then: Hellström hasn't been able shake her fascination with pigmented Jesmonite, the acrylic-based plaster she originally used in her breakout Sedimentation vases.

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01.14.17

Saturday Selects

Week of January 9, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we decided MORE IS MORE by embracing yet another collection of terrazzo tables, yet another source for affordable art, and yet another series of beautiful, sculptural vases (pictured above) that blur the line between art and design.

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01.13.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sunset-Inspired Color Fades Meet Slabs of Marble In This Stunning Paris Exhibition

The Belgian painter Pieter Vermeersch has been known to fill rooms with soft, colorful gradients that define architectural space in beautifully strange ways, bordering on optical illusion. Both those works and his new canvases, on view now at Galerie Perrotin, dovetail with Vermeersch's professional origins in photography in the way they deal with light and perspective — but the new works physically ground all that ethereal color with panels of heavy marble.

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01.12.17

Shopping

This Collection Is Turning Design’s Biggest Trends Into Stuff You Can Actually Afford

We pride ourselves here on generally being able to spot or define trends as they're taking shape, but it's sometimes just as interesting to track what happens to those trends when they begin to be picked up by the masses. That's why retailers like West Elm have always been so fascinating to us: They're essentially the fulcrum, the point at which trends swing from an insider-y secret to something anyone might adopt into their living rooms. Their latest collection might be our favorite example of this yet.

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01.11.17

Up and Coming

Why This Melbourne Creative Switched from Sculpture to Styling

A love of materiality and working with objects is what initially drove Natalie Turnbull to sculpture. But it was a break from the art scene that finally set the Melbourne-based stylist and art director on her own path. In 2012, when Turnbull moved to New York to intern with both Confetti System and Fredericks and Mae, she realized that these designers had created a career path for themselves that didn’t exist before they started — and that she, too, could do the same.

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02.25.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Barbara Kasten at the ICA Philadelphia

If Barbara Kasten’s colorful, angular compositions look as though they could have been arranged just last week by some prop stylist in Los Angeles — well, consider that a testament to Kasten’s massive, if massively underappreciated, influence. The Chicago-based artist and photographer is currently the subject of a long overdue solo exhibition at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art; Stages spans five decades of work, from fiber sculptures to cyanotype prints to set design to a brand-new, site-specific installation that plays beautifully with the ICA’s interior architecture.

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01.10.17

Up and Coming

Five New Ceramics Collections We’re Feeling Right Now

Sometimes we get the feeling that we have altogether enough stuff. But then the period between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve happens, and we realize that we somehow don't have all the requisite items for serving food, displaying flowers, or generally decking out our dinner table in a manner befitting a design editor. So this round-up couldn't have come at a better time: Meet five new ceramicists creating work that's sculptural but functional, minimal but avant-garde, and generally chic as hell.

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01.09.17

Studio Visit

At 83, Vasa — and His Famed Acrylic Sculptures — Are Still On Top of the LA Art World

When our friend and sometime contributor Robin Stein emailed us to reveal that Los Angeles artist — and longtime SU obsession — Vasa Mihich was an old family friend, and ask if we might be interested in shooting his Los Angeles studio and archives, we jumped at the chance. What Stein's photos reveal is something that we, who often focus on design's newest and youngest practitioners, rarely have access to: a portrait of an octogenarian artist, still producing at a rapid clip, at the height of his career and his potential; a maker clearly in love with both his materials and his process.

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01.07.17

Saturday Selects

Week of January 2, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a highlight from our new vintage-only Instagram, an epic pink kitchen with terrazzo countertops, and a shelving unit (above) that reaffirms our love for an up-and-coming Dutch designer.

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01.05.17

Up and Coming

This Studio’s First Collection Is Inspired By Drinking and Fast Cars

You'd think that the new graphics and furniture studio Hey, Porter were based in Monte Carlo or St. Tropez based on the descriptions they've given their first designs: chairs inspired by the "1st running of the 24-Hour Le Mans Automobile Race in France," bar carts named after a "cunning craft cocktail ace from 19th-century London." Alas, their backstory is not quite as dramatic as their influences would suggest — but we're still intrigued.

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01.04.17

Sighted

The “It” Colors of the Season, According to AD France

A new AD France photoshoot, created by creative director Thibaut Mathieu in collaboration with photographer Peter Langer, focuses on this season's color palettes — which, according to them, include "soap bubble" shades, dense blues, golden hues, intense reds, and copper. It was too good not to repost here.

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01.03.17

Up and Coming

An Emerging Norwegian Design Duo, Inspired by the Scandinavian Winter

While others may bemoan this season’s ever-wintery temperatures, young Norwegian design studio Domaas/Høgh look to the colder skies as an excuse to imbue their work with a bit of coziness. “This might sound like a cliché, but seasonal change is not something that passes us by without notice,” note the duo, when asked what’s been inspiring them of late. In truth, that awareness seems to be instinctive to Norwegian designers as a whole.

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12.30.16

Sight Unseen Presents

10 Insiders on the Best Design Moments of 2016

We come here every day to tell you about our favorite things — so for our last round-up of 2016, it seemed only fair that we spread the love. We asked 10 of our favorite design insiders to reflect on their best design moments of the past year — an experience they had, an exhibition they saw, a discovery they made, an interior they fell in love with — as well as the one thing they’re most looking forward to in the new year. Enjoy, and see you back here in 2017!

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