A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week was heavy on excellent exhibitions: Two art-furniture greats, friends since the ’80s, join forces in a collaborative exhibition at Superhouse; a historical and contemporary showcase meditating on shadows opens at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery; and the Swedish Grace movement gets a spotlight at Galerie56, among others. 

Interiors

For a ground floor extension in a Victorian row house in northeast London, multidisciplinary design and architecture studio Archive For Space kept it neutral and warm, using durable, affordable materials in this family residence. Concrete blocks and terracotta tiles contrast with Douglas fir and plywood. AFS, founded by Arabella Maza and Stephen Maginn, collaborated with interior designer Tabitha Organ to style the space, sourcing furniture from London’s Béton Brut gallery. Photos © Peter Molloy

Spanish furniture company Sancal’s sustainable new home, Colab, is part showroom, part office, part exhibition space, and part creative workshop. Designed with Lucas Muñoz Muñoz, it transforms the fourth floor of Madrid’s historic O’Donnell 34 building, originally envisioned in 1966 by architect Antonia Lamela, by re-imagining and re-using what was already there but updating it. While taking apart a lackluster ’90s refurb, the team discovered hidden elements, like the original terrazzo floor, made of large tiles with brass joints, that could be given new life.

Exhibitions

Maddie Coven

Wretched Flowers

Rooms Studio

The play of shadow and light starts to take on a somber and contemplative air this time of year. The contrast of wintry darkness and illumination — and the feelings it elicits — is the focus of the latest collection at the Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, In Praise of Shadows. Taking its name from a 1933 essay by Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, the show features lighting, objects, and furniture. Works by contemporary designers including Claudia Girbau Pina, Bruno Grizzo, Calvin Marcus, Charlap Hyman & Herrero with Pilar Almon, Nick Poe, Shin Okuda, Madeline Coven, Kelly Fung, Rooms Studio, and Wretched Flowers mix with pieces by Joe Colombo, Eileen Gray, Josef Frank for Svenskt Tenn, along with décor from 18th Century New England. On view through January 11th. Photos © Dan McMahon

In Melbourne, art director Marsha Golemac’s first solo show at Oigall Projects has a quiet depth that allows for thoughts and questions to surface — about functionality, mystery, and beauty and how they interact. Using materials like aluminum, steel, rubber, latex, and wood, Golemac intertwines the industrial and the domestic in her examination of what commonplace objects hold, as literal vessels, but also the associations and memories they contain and evoke over time. Up through November 27th.

Swedish Grace, a new exhibition at Manhattan’s Galerie56, in collaboration with Sweden’s Jackson Design, focuses on the Swedish Grace design movement, which came about after World War I. It’s a style that emphasized craftsmanship while mechanization was favored in much of Europe at the time. The show includes a monumental table by Anna Petrus, which was originally exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1927 as part of The Swedish Exhibition of Decorative Arts, alongside works by Gunnar Asplund, Axel Einar Hjorth, and Uno Åhrén. Through January 31st.

At last weekend’s Salon Art + Design, Verso presented Spotlight III, the third exhibition of Black Folks in Design. Curated by Little Wing Lee of Studio & Projects, Spotlight III showcased a stellar range of work, from floral installations and hand-made furniture to textiles and paintings, including pieces by Asmite, Jonas Damon, Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Shoshanna Weinberger, Studio Ker (Michael Bennett), Studio & Projects, and Swallow and Tea (Kelechi Ejikeme). Photos © Kerry Marshall

Recent works from art furniture greats Tom Loeser and Wendy Maruyama are now on view in Colorama, a two-artist show at Superhouse. In the early ’80s, they both broke with traditional woodworking and finishing techniques, reconceptualizing what wooden furniture can be. Maruyama filled joinery with purple resin, Loeser carved and painted colorful geometric patterns onto surfaces. In 1983, Maruyama invited Loeser to a residency at the Appalachian Center for Crafts, starting something of a 40-year creative conversation that picks up again with this exhibit. Murayama, who now lives in San Diego and Loeser, who’s in Madison, Wisconsin, worked together to make it cohesive. As radical as ever, their recent pieces reflect turns in their own lives along with contemporary concerns. Murayama’s white oak cabinets contend with health and aging, while themes of political polarization and social fracturing make their way into Loeser’s “Chairiot.” Up through January 11th. Photos © Matthew Gordon

Discoveries

The partnership between AFS and Béton Brut that we mentioned up top continues with Alu, a limited furniture collection — a stool, a chair, and a bench — made of unsealed aluminum sheets that will develop a patina over time. Maza and Maginn had paper scrolls in mind when designing this seating, which has a bold presence but is lightweight and moveable.

Big Night, the New York homeware shop devoted to dinner and dinner parties, is extending the hospitality vibe beyond the evening. Their new capsule collection made in collaboration with Far West Collective, responsible for a selection of soft goods at Hotel Saint Vincent and El Cosmico, features a robe, eye mask, duvets and pillowcases in a smart, cheery red-orange and white stripe.

Irregular Process is the serendipitous result of an open-ended collaboration between Melbourne-based interior architect Holly White and graphic designer Matthew Tambellini of More Studio. The chairs they produced – one in lacquered meringue yellow, another made of solid mountain ash, and the third consisting of cedar slabs – are almost like three-dimensional puzzles in how their angular and geometric pieces fit together.

Hanukkah falls late this year, leaving some extra time for Menorah-sourcing, and Los Angeles design studio Project Room has a new collection of humble ones that are a little Brutalist and a little arts and craft workshop. Members of the Project Room team sculpted each of the five iterations with aluminum foil and then sand-cast them in solid aluminum at their local foundry. Project Room’s descriptions probably do them more justice than we ever could. Take the Lizz menorah: “The cylindrical shape of Lizz’s menorah recalls a summer camp recorder, each candle a high-pitched squeal, coming together in a passable rendition of Debbie Friedman.” Or the Ruby: “No need to put aluminum foil underneath Ruby’s menorah, it brought its own.”

The HOME 03 collection at online gallery Wondering People features over 120 original, handmade pieces, including lighting, ceramics and furniture made by 20 international artists designers. Pieces like Ali Hewson’s stoneware candlesticks, platters by Charlotte Salt, sculptural stoneware forms by Shane Gabier, and an aluminum serving tray by Joseph Ellwood add character and depth to any domestic space.