Home Sydney
06.29.22

Sighted

Olivia Bossy Doesn’t Care If You Love Her New Collection (Though Obviously We Do!)

If everyone likes Olivia Bossy’s work, then she doesn’t see the point. “There’s a dullness to something globally pleasing,” she says. “There’s always a reason and a story for me, but people can love it, hate it, or feel nothing for their own reasons.” Speaking for ourselves, though, we find the curve of sheet metal manipulated into a spiral, the rich black wood, and the coarse, illuminated fabric of the Sydney-based designer’s first furniture collection to be deeply appealing. Called Objects 2022, it's an unconventional collection born from an unusual gathering of inspirations.
More
06.27.22

Travel

Three New Hotels by Star Designers — on Three Opposite Sides of the Globe

We're only halfway through 2022, and it's already a really good year for hotel interiors. The past few months saw the opening of quite a few properties by major designers we know and love, and today we're sharing three of our favorites, which happen to be on three opposite sides of the globe: the latest Ace Hotel, in Sydney; Habita Group's Terrestre hotel in Puerto Escondido; and 25hours Indre By, an oasis smack in the center of Copenhagen.
More
Hannah Nowlan Tatsiana Shevarenkova
04.02.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Exhibition, Abstract Paintings and Anthropomorphic Vessels Pair Perfectly

In ballet terms, a pas de deux is a duet. Two dancers perform a sequence in such perfect, excruciating synchronicity that it appears they are, for the fleeting moments they inhabit the stage, two halves of the same whole. This kind of creative coupling is what curator Kitty Clark had in mind when she put together her latest show, Soul Bed, featuring painter Hannah Nowlan and ceramic artist Tatsiana Shevarenkova, which just opened its doors at Saint Cloche Gallery in Sydney, Australia.
More
03.03.21

Graphic Design

A Roberto Burle Marx book, and Other Graphic Design Picks for March

In a new column, each month The Brand Identity will share with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: A book on the work of iconic landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx, the design of a favorite Spotify playlist series, an identity for an experimental Australian tea house, and more.
More
07.27.17

Up and Coming

Gradients and Bands of Gold: Jonny Niesche’s Mesmerizing New Paintings

For the Sydney-based, Australian-born artist Jonny Niesche, one of the more transformative moments of his career occurred while studying abroad at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. During a crit, a mentor likened Niesche's work to a Tumblr, meaning that he hadn’t yet established enough parameters or guidelines for his practice — or, in other words, the things that might make his work stand out as his. “As long as you think about the principles of your work, then it can be your work no matter what material or form it comes in,” he was told.
More
08.12.16

Sighted

A Darkly Cinematic Furniture Collection, Rooted in Retrofuturism

Use Your Illusions is the third collection we've featured by the Sydney-based design studio Page Thirty Three, but it's the most cohesive by far, inspired by nostalgic visions of the future but rooted in the here and now and the studio's interest in ritual. "I love looking at how the future was forecast 50 years ago, and comparing it to how we live today," explains co-founder and creative director Ryan Hanrahan. "In most cases I like the alternate space-age visions that I saw on the big screen — or dreamt up as a kid — much more. I think a lot of what we design comes from these childhood obsessions."
More
01.27.15

Eye Candy

Louise Zhang, Artist

Sydney-based artist Louise Zhang's work is concerned not with the familiar straight lines of geometry, but with the lack of any distinct form. More simply, she works with blobs. Her attraction to the formless began with a childhood fascination with slime and goo. Building off the allure of all-things-goopy, her paintings and sculptures — made from materials ranging from acrylic, oil, enamel, resin, expanding polyurethane, gap filler, and silicone — explore the infinite transformations a shapeless form can possess. Add to this an intense candy-coated color palette and you've got a body of work that's both unquestionably attractive and charmingly grotesque.
More
07.31.13

Eye Candy

Korban/Flaubert’s Hunter Maquettes

Sydney's Korban/Flaubert make large-scale sculptures and design objects out of flowing, bending, beautifully contorted metal — objects that show off both their own technical capabilities and those of their Sydney metalworking studio. But before they scale up, they often start small, with miniature models that function like a sketchbook come to life, showing off their ideas to potential clients. Their latest series of maquettes — each of which is only a few feet wide — features "a single folded, crushed line compressed into an agitated solid," they write. "An artifact in Corten steel."
More