A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: ’70s-inspired lamps to pair with your vintage leather sofa, a new furniture collection by up-and-coming New York architects, and five exhibitions worth seeing now, including the beautiful wooden sculptures of Riyosuke Yazaki (above).

Exhibitions

We’re very enamored with the sculptures of the Tokyo- and Los Angeles–based artist Ryosuke Yazaki, which have a Noguchi / Hepworth vibe; his newest works (above and at top) are currently on view at The Future Perfect in San Francisco, where he did a live woodcarving earlier this month. The sculptures are made from ichii, hinoki, and sequoia wood, as well as terra cotta, and you can view them all here. (Photos by Daniel Dent)
The work of L.A. sculptor Gisela Colon activates the same primal, child-like reward center in our brains as, say, a handful of glitter — we get a weird giddy feeling when we see her massive monolithic slabs of iridescent carbon fiber or layered, blow-molded acrylic pods in opalescent colors. The pieces above, in particular, are part of a new solo show of hers that opened this month at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in L.A.
This is probably the first — and last — time you’ll see a smiley face in the pages of Sight Unseen, but this week we found ourselves attracted to the monochromatic paintings of Volker Hüller, who has a show up right now at New York’s Van Doren Waxter gallery, and yeah, we just went with it. The faces, and the other textural elements on the canvases, are actually a collage of dried grass, paper towels, stones, and faux crocodile skin.
On view now in Stockholm, Post Amorfa is a show of concrete sculptures by the artist Simon Anund, including this series of colored concrete blobs floating atop white cast-concrete canvases. Anund, who cites Rachel Whiteread as an inspiration, calls the show “an architectonic allegory about the time we live in. A time where big words and beautiful façades are often only crumbling illusions.” The paintings look pretty sturdy, though.
Also sturdy-looking: the newest designs by François Bauchet, which are cast in sand, concrete, and resin. They’ll be on view at Galerie Kreo in both Paris and London next month.

Discoveries

New York architects (and 2016 American Design Hot List winners) ASH NYC have been sporadically releasing pieces of furniture for awhile now, but this week marked the launch of their first full, official line, called The WC Collection. Our picks are the WC2 daybed and the colorful WC3 side tables, but it’s all pretty great, and will all be available to purchase eventually on 1stdibs.
Every time we do a mega fair roundup like the one we published earlier this week, featuring the hits from Maison et Objet and IMM Cologne, we inevitably miss something; Dezeen this week alerted us to the release of this gorgeous pine room divider connected by leather strips, by Maison designer of the year Cecilie Manz.
Ditto a stunning new brand of large, ’70s-inspired lamps called Haos, which combine brass and glass with warmly-glazed, cylindrical ceramic bodies. The colors are so spot-on; your ’70s leather sectional needs these.
We got a little update from the talents at Kueng Caputo this week, including a sneak peek of a new carpet series the duo created in rubber granulate, with patterns designed in homage to Moroccan rug artisans. They’re on view in Zurich this weekend, and will be shown at Nomad St. Moritz next month.
They may have a bit of a nomenclature issue, but the Dirty Mirrors series by Stay Evil Kids (oy), are quite beautiful to behold. Consisting of lacquered or natural-wood shapes inset with double-sided mirrors that are finished in various color-washes or ombre tints, they’re the first project by the nine-month-old South African design studio.
Was anyone else aware that Tobia Scarpa designed an oblong blue table on an iridescent metal base in 1984? Because we most certainly were not, and got a pretty big kick out of discovering it on the site of Nicholas and Alistair this week. Future dream house acquisition.
Speaking of fave tables, we were happy to be reminded of this galvanized Noguchi gem recently while browsing the offerings of antiques purveyor Converso, which just opened a new showroom in L.A.’s West Hollywood neighborhood — the third for the 25-year-old dealers, who also have outposts in Chicago and NYC.
Just stumbled on the work of Lauren Reed — an up-and-coming Toronto talent who we’re now officially keeping an eye on — on the Instagram account @marianadesigncanada, which features a different Canadian design object every day. We love this collection of a wooden table, lamp, spherical bookend, and table mirror, all stained the same shade of black.
I put the Molekule in my holiday gift guide back in December, but now that the perpetually sold-out air purifier is finally back in stock and available to purchase, felt like it was worth re-posting here. Yes, the Molekule is expensive ($799), but if its within your budget and you have allergies as bad as mine, you’ll get why it’s so major — not only does it use a new type of technology that’s better at destroying gross stuff, it’s the only purifier good-looking enough that I truly don’t mind it taking up space in my tiny 100 square-foot bedroom.
For his first monograph, released this week, Los Angeles designer Jonathan Olivares took a unique visual approach — he commissioned the noted fashion photographer Zoe Ghertner to document his furniture, and she shot the works as though she were taking their portraits. The book also has one very special, literal portrait, on the cover: of Olivares’s dog.

Links

We love these illustrations from the December issue of Wallpaper, by Leonie Bos. They’re the first in a series of illustrated “dream home” scenarios featuring actual products, like the Antonio Citterio sofa and Gio Ponti table lamps above. Check out the rest (and all the credits for these) here.