A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A look way back at — what else? — 1970s-era Italian design; a dip into the recent past in Milan; and a forecast of things to come at our OFFSITE event, debuting in just two weeks! Plus, the amazing risograph talents of Glasgow-based artist Gabriella Marcella, above.

Links

Images of the swings Philippe Malouin created for Caesarstone have been all over the web in the weeks since Milan. But we had to go hunting for close-up pictures of the incredible planters the London designer debuted simultaneously in order to highlight the interesting material properties of the quartz rock. We love these colorful, textural examples, which demonstrate how Caesarstone can be used in inlay applications. Designboom has a full overview here.
An Instagram discovery this week was The Granite, a Portland, Oregon–based all-female collaborative who make ceramic wares in a perfect palette of black, white, pink, and electric blue. We love the styling of the vase above, but our favorite product might be this mismatched set of espresso cups, with one solid handle and one cutout. You might remember Italian designer Valentina Cameranesi from the amazing, Sottsass-inspired vases of hers we published last fall. Her latest is a series of angular, Plexiglas containers, commissioned by Yoox.com for its Made in Milano project, which asked nine Milan-based studios to create objects that could be fabricated entirely within the city’s confines.
Speaking of Milanese designers, our obsession continues with the Italian designer and manufacturer Cleto Munari (whom, you’ll recall, commissioned jewelry by architects like Arata Isozaki, Peter Shire, and Michele de Lucchi). De Lucchi is also responsible for this 1979 sterling silver and plastic pitcher for Munari, which we found this week on 1stdibs.
We got an email in our inboxes this week from Glasgow-based graphic artist Gabriella Marcella, introducing us to not one but two excellent new projects: The first is Risotto, a risograph print studio where you can upload your own design for reproduction, hire Marcella to create something for you, or purchase one of the pre-designed posters like those at the top of this post and above. The second project is Tappeti, a new series of artisan rugs made in Scotland and art-directed by Marcella. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one! A nice interview on Design Milk with Maarten Baas, whose launch flew relatively under the radar in Milan last month. His Das Pop collection for Lasvit, shown here, marries the rough, textural fingerprints of his Clay collection with the smoothness of mouth-blown glass. Here, he talks about new work as well as passing the torch to a new generation of design students at Design Academy Eindhoven, where he teaches.

Discoveries
Ornate, historical environments were used to great effect in Milan this year (see Philippe Malouin’s aforementioned swing set in palazzo) but sometimes the busyness of the interior actually detracts from the beauty of the works. Case in point: It was hard to discern what we loved in ECAL’s exhibition of luxury goods made with Swiss craftsmen at the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi until we saw the pickup art. We especially love this brass and stone container by Stefano Panterotto.
Some epic Pinteresting this week led Monica to this 1945 Bruno Munari alarm clock, called L’Ora X, which had rotating half-discs instead of hands. It was produced in multiples in 1963 but we’d never seen it until now. As Monica said, “Someone needs to reissue — or remake — this STAT.” This week we were introduced to Line, a cute new collection of furniture and lighting by New Zealand father-and-daughter team Douglas and Bec. Each piece is designed by Bec Dowie and then fabricated by her father, Douglas Snelling, with a team of local artisans. The new collection represents a move from a mostly wood aesthetic to a more expanded materials palette that includes blackened brass, glass, steel, and painted timber. This week we got a preview of something special that Indiana-based studio LUUR is producing for our Sight Unseen OFFSITE exhibition, which opens in two weeks. Made from Corian and neodymium magnets, the studio’s North/South bracelets are a modern take on friendship jewelry, where you can buy several different halves and swap them out with others from your own collection or share them with friends. Speaking of OFFSITE, this year our production team is led by Jonathan Irons of the Brooklyn-based studio Cain Cain. While poking around his website, we found that the studio does not only event production but furniture as well, including this beautiful brass and walnut triangle mirror.

Exhibitions
Artsy clued us in last year on the great work Brooklyn-based artist Kate Steciw is doing. Her newest exhibition is at Retrospective, the Hudson, New York gallery owned by Zach Feuer, and she’s broadened her signature series of layered stock images, manipulated in Photoshop, with an increasingly complex system of frames. (Artsy also has a great primer on the artist here.)
LA artist Math Bass gets her first museum solo exhibition this week at MoMA PS1; “Off the Clock” will show most of the artist’s recent work as well as a new video commissioned specially for this exhibition. What is the significance of the recurring cigarette in Bass’s work? We want to know. “Bass’s paintings deploy a personal lexicon that centers on possible actions or transitional spaces: cigarettes emit plumes of smoke; alligators emerge with mouths wide open; letters and punctuation marks twist and overlap; and archways, staircases, and zigzags suggest movement.”