Home Brussels
04.03.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

See Inside Maniera Gallery’s New Home, a Belgian Art Deco Masterpiece

When Belgian design gallery Maniera first opened nearly a decade ago, the works were located inside the loftlike apartment of Maniera's founders, Amaryllis Jacobs and Kwinten Lavigne. The gallery has gone through many incarnations since then — including once popping up in a famed Brutalist house in Ghent — until this spring, when it moved into its new permanent digs: the Hôtel Danckaert, also known as Villa Dewin, a landmarked Art Deco building in Brussels designed in 1922 by architect Jean-Baptiste Dewin. Maniera’s first exhibition in the space, which opened last month, features 15 new designs by artists and architects, all of which were created to respond to the gallery's imposing setting. 
More
How to Live With Objects Helene Rebelo
11.08.22

At Home With

How to Live With Objects Sneak Peek! Inside a Colorful Brussels Loft That Perfectly Mixes the Vintage and the New

Often when we first tell people we're releasing our first book, they assume it's a compilation of stories from Sight Unseen's archives, or a compendium of the homes of creatives. In fact, it's more like a reference book or handbook, one that — over the span of nearly 50,000 words — advises you on how to make your house a home. That said, we would have been remiss if we spent that much time talking about how to live with objects without showing you some prime examples of people who are successfully doing just that, like Hélène Rebelo and Edouard Beauget, whose colorful Brussels loft we're excerpting today.
More
05.23.22

Fair Report

25 Projects We Loved at This Weekend’s 2022 Collectible Design Fair in Brussels

This past weekend marked the fifth edition of the Brussels design fair Collectible, and while our schedules failed to align with an IRL visit, we did our best to round up our favorite participants from afar, everything from old favorites like Maarten de Ceulaer's stained glass lamp series — which got a few new additions this month — to exciting new discoveries like Sarah Becchio and Paolo Borghino of Errante Architetture, who debuted a series of hardware-free MDF coffee tables. Browse our finds after the jump!
More
03.19.19

Fair Report

17 Projects We Loved at This Year’s Collectible Fair in Brussels

We didn't have the pleasure of personally attending this year's Collectible design fair in Brussels, where Sight Unseen hosted an installation by Objects of Common Interest, yet word traveled quickly back to us that those who did had taken to referring to our presentation as "the famous booth," an accolade that Instagram seemed to confirm. We were flattered to hear it, of course, but also honored to share the spotlight with so many other great presentations by galleries and up-and-coming designers. Click through to see our favorites.
More
09.29.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Young Italian Designer’s New Take On Centuries-Old Venetian Glass

Combining centuries-old Murano glass with a kind of icy, sci-fi geometry, Venetian designer Giorgia Zanellato’s latest collection aims to showcase the magic of the material. “Sospesi” — Italian for “suspended”— is a series of nine glass pieces that play with light and balance, where the milky and richly intense blues reflect and change with the light.
More
06.22.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Slowly by Sam Moyer at Galerie Rodolphe Jansen

While the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based artist Sam Moyer has played around with fabric painted to look like marble in the past, the geometric panels suspended in gorgeous bronze armatures that she recently installed at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels are, in fact, the real deal. Meant to interact with the space's striking ceilings and the summer light that filters through them, the slabs are cut so thin as to be almost semi-translucent, a subverting of expectations about the way certain materials are supposed to look, feel, and function — a common theme in Moyer's work, and one that will sound familiar to many designers, which is probably why we've found ourselves so drawn to her.
More
11.25.14

Eye Candy

Ann Veronica Janssens, Artist

Lately it feels like whenever we've seen a piece at an art fair that we love, it's turned out to be the work of one of a very small group of our favorite artists (Alicja Kwade, Thea Djordjaze, Jonas Wood, David Korty, etc) whose work seems to pops up again and again in such contexts. One of the most frequent is Ann Veronica Janssens, a British-born, Brussels-based artist whose practice is based around finding ways to visualize light and other ephemeral forces while balancing them against the more tangible qualities of architecture. Janssens has been around for awhile — she represented Britain at the 1999 Venice Biennale — but we're particularly fond of her most recent body of work, which is more object-based than light-based. See a selection of it after the jump.
More
08.29.14

Sighted

The Game’s New Online Shop

With Labor Day around the corner (we'll be taking off this Monday, along with the rest of America) we're allowing ourselves to get just a tiny bit excited about the impending fall. Sweaters, the color navy, and the smell of burning leaves are right up there among our favorite things. Fall is also the time when we stop spending our waking hours wondering when we can next get to the beach and start spending them a bit more inside on the computer, shopping for knickknacks that will make the homes we're about to spend a whole lot more time in even cozier. Our newest destination is The Game, a brand new shop that exists both online and in two Belgian outposts, founded and curated by Alexis Ryngaert, who's also behind of one of our all-time favorite design galleries, Victor Hunt.
More
06.18.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

Platform at Almine Rech Gallery

File under so simple it’s genius: This month, the Brussels gallery Almine Rech launched an exhibition, curated by Parisian art critic Nicolas Trembley, that mostly repurposes work from the gallery’s own collection. Called Platform, its primary conceit is a single, 55-foot-long white plinth running the length of the exhibition space, where all of the works on view joust for space, including Gavin Turk’s vinyl-painted Turkey Foil Box, Alex Israel’s marble and Styrofoam fro-yo cup, Andy Warhol’s Brillo box, Ettore Sottsass’s Casablanca bookshelf, and an array of Steuler vases we’re guessing might have come from Trembley’s own collection. Besides highlighting the three-dimensional aspect of the pieces — and making viewers reconsider items they might have passed over if displayed alone — Platform also “establishes a dialogue between the notions of design and contemporary art, objects of consumption, mass culture and subjects of contemplation” and asks the question: “What is an art object and what is the place of the object in art?” We’ve excerpted a few of our favorite images here.
More
03.24.14

Up and Coming

Tim Colmant, Illustrator

For everyone who's ever bought, coveted, or loved the famous laminates of the Memphis design group — or is semi-ashamedly stalking the new Nathalie Du Pasquier collection at American Apparel — it is nearly impossible not to fall for the work of the young Belgian illustrator Tim Colmant. We succumbed the moment we discovered his cheerful illustrations a little over a year ago, and went on to recommend him to Jonah Takagi, furniture designer and co-founder of the housewares brand Field, when he curated an exhibition for our Noho Design District event last year. A few weeks ago, we found out that our little matchmaking scheme had evolved even further, into a collaboration between Colmant and Takagi's insanely talented girlfriend Mary Timony, whose new band Ex Hex has hired him to wrap its merch in his signature Microsoft Paint–inspired designs. We figured it was time to check in and see what else Colmant has been up to in the year since we first featured him.
More