Faye Toogood Friedman Benda

At Friedman Benda, Faye Toogood Channels Her Spiritual and Earthly Instincts

Since showing her first ​Assemblage​ furniture collection back in 2010, British designer Faye Toogood has evolved the series, adding pieces in new materials to each subsequent collection — from sycamore and stone, to resin and steel, to patinated brass and wire mesh, to fiberglass and plaster. Her latest range, ​Assemblage 5​, on show at Friedman Benda in New York in the designer's first solo U.S. exhibition, is inspired by spiritual objects but bound by her signature balance of elemental materials, invoking a strong sense of ritual and permanence.
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The Campana Brothers at Friedman Benda

If you’re a longtime reader of Sight Unseen, you know it’s rare that we write about a big-name designer. In part, it’s a question of access — it’s far easier to get an RCA grad on the phone than, say, Hella Jongerius. But it’s also a question of ubiquity: If you read a bunch of design blogs, you’re going to hear about something like Yves Behar’s new Smart Lock until your face falls off. But the Campana Brothers — despite being one of the biggest names in design — have somehow always eluded that extreme ubiquity.
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Body Parts Are Trending in Design, and Our New Book Proves It

In the last five years — somewhere between the giant nose vase German duo BNAG produced for Felix Burrichter's dollhouse exhibition at Friedman Benda and the butt bookends Marco Braunschweiler made for Marta's In Support of Books — body parts in design became a full-fledged thing. That's why we weren't a bit surprised when we noticed, visiting the 16 homes we photographed for How to Live With Objects, that body parts were popping up seemingly everywhere — from the Nicola L eye lamp in Yoram Heller and Eleanor Wells's living room, to the giant hand sitting at the base of Jonathan Pessin's object-filled bookshelves, to the nose relief on display in the London home of Sadie Perry.
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Candle Wax Tables and Mattress Foam Chairs: Tour One of the Best Waste-Material Reclamations We’ve Seen

Carsten in der Elst's recent graduate project, Heavy Duty, is every design student ever's wet dream — traveling around to different regional factories, asking them to identify their primary waste materials, then collaborating with them to use their existing production processes to turn those byproducts into something new. Unlike every other design student ever, though, in der Elst's results actually transcend his original thesis, amounting to a vast collection of objects that, if a gallery like Kreo or Friedman Benda released them from a mid-career designer, we wouldn't bat an eyelash.
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The 40+ Best Things We Saw at Design Miami 2017

The design side of things seemed particularly strong this year, from the so-weird-it's-genius idea to recreate Muller Van Severen's Ghent living room from scratch in an installation for Airbnb, to Chris Schanck's shimmering, Little Mermaid–colored cabinet for Friedman Benda, to Christopher Prinz's wrinkled, oil-slick benches for Patrick Parrish.
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All the Exhibitions, Projects, and Artworks We Loved From This Month’s 2024 Frieze Week in Los Angeles

Last week was Frieze week in L.A., the only time of year when the city provides art and design folks with a robust events schedule full of opportunities to repeatedly mingle with old friends and new, eat lots of free food, and of course, see great work. The action centers around the Frieze Los Angeles art fair itself, which just wrapped its especially color-soaked fifth edition, but at the same time encompasses the Felix Art Fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the city's ever-growing roster of art and design galleries, and a host of other exhibitions and events that pop up around them.
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The 100 Best Things We Saw at Miami Art and Design Week 2023

The last time we physically attended Design Miami, believe it or not, was in 2014. We haven't ventured back since, in part because the party scene got so out of hand that it felt, in the end, like it was starting to eclipse the experience of actually seeing design and art. So we sat out the better part of the last decade, watching and collecting materials from the sidelines instead. This month was the first time we ventured back, and what we found was a completely transformed event: the glitz and fanfare were greatly diminished, while the work, particularly on the design side, seemed stronger than ever.
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Week of May 8, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: New York’s buzziest new restaurant, a book about Noguchi’s love for Greece, more “Neolithic-core,” and an amazing ring with a famous designer’s nose on it.
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All the Best Art — and Design — We Saw at the 2023 Frieze Week in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is certainly not the most social town — compared to New York, where design and art events happen nightly and, as a professional, you could pretty much get by never paying for a glass of wine, LA's calendar can't really compete. Which is why things feel so much more exciting when Frieze comes to town each February, and suddenly your calendar fills up and you're running into interesting people left and right, multiple times a day. For those of us who crave creative stimulation, it's a boon, the time of year when galleries, stores, and makers sync up to showcase new works and new ideas. See (almost) everything we saw after the jump.
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The 2022 American Design Hot List, Part I

This week we announced our 10th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the first group of Hot List designers here — Adi Goodrich, Anders Ruhwald, Astraeus Clarke, Bradley L. Bowers, and Carmen D'Apollonio.
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