Meet the 1980s-Era Designer Whose Chair Went Semi-Viral During the Pandemic

The impulse to reassess design from the late '70s and '80s — and to place it in a current context — has clearly been in the air, most notably at last year’s Return to Downtown group show from Superhouse and Magen H Gallery and at the more recent Blurring the Timeline show, also at Superhouse. Standout pieces from both exhibitions included chairs by a designer whose name you might not be familiar with: Howard Meister, part of the core group of designer-artists at Art et Industrie, a now-legendary New York gallery that opened in 1977 and closed in the late '90s. Here, we caught up with Meister from his home in Western Massachusetts. In a roving, entertaining interview, he shared with us how he got his largely accidental start and went from being “a dope in a suit” to an artist, his belief in the importance of craft and his desire not to be “survived by crap."
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This Is One 1980s Trend Revival We Didn’t See Coming

We're not sure if it's a comfort thing or a style thing, and we're not sure if it reminds anyone else of the La-Z-Boys of yore, but if you've been watching carefully the past few years, you may have noticed that furniture designers — most particularly when it comes to beds and sofas — have been embracing a very specific aesthetic with roots in the 1980s.
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Paolo Pallucco 1980s archive furniture

A Retrospective of 1980s Furniture Visionary Paolo Pallucco Opens in Paris

If you’ve been following the trend cycle of archive and vintage furniture over the past few years, you'll have noticed by now that the 1980s are back in a big way. We’ve recently covered a few — like Czech Modernist Bořek Šípek and Italian artist-designer Pucci de Rossi — but it seems like every month there's a new figure that's resurfaced and reevaluated in the present day. The latest is designer and manufacturer Paolo Pallucco, whose brief stint at the helm of his eponymous brand produced some of the most radical furniture of the decade — and who is now the subject of a new exhibition in Paris at Ketabi Projects.
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Week of May 30, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Beige is back, so are Tevas, and yet another Wright auction is absolutely killing it (the upcoming Contemporary Glass — which introduced us to this granite and glass concoction by glass artist William Carlson — is just. so. good.)
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