Afternoon Sculptures by Erik Olovsson

Today on the site, we're featuring Swedish designer Erik Olovsson, who's debuting in Milan this week a collection of stools made from slatted pine and treated with various hues and patterns of screen-print dye. Olovsson's been documenting his experiments in color-treated on Instagram with the hashtag #afternoonsculptures, and we're excerpting a few of our favorites here today.
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A Design Legend in the Making Breaks Out On His Own

When we first heard rumblings that RO/LU — the epically talented, intellectually formidable Minneapolis-based studio that we've been covering and collaborating with since its move into furniture design five years ago — was ending, we were sad but also a little excited. After all, what would its multi-disciplinary founders get up to next? This week, we got our first glimpse into RO/LU co-founder and creative director Matt Olson's new studio, called OOIEE.
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Jesse Moretti at Patrick Parrish

A New Series of Pastel Paintings, Inspired by Floridian Hues

In her colorful, line-driven work, Brooklyn artist Jesse Moretti has always explored the space between flatness and dimensionality, and the visual tricks one might use to create a bridge between the two. Her newest body of work, called FOAME — on view through Sunday at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York — does so quite literally: In many of her paintings, Moretti employs a shadowy line that creates the illusion of a canyon carved into the wood — or, perhaps, like an X-acto knife cut into foam.
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Nick Ross sandstone furniture

Seriously Modern Vibes From a Collection Inspired by Ancient Texts

With so many designers mining references from only the last decade or so, it can be weirdly refreshing to talk to someone like Nick Ross, whose influences run more towards Mesopotamia than Memphis. Ancient trade routes, Greek and Roman sculptures — these are the things that inspire the Stockholm-based, Scottish-born designer, whom we first featured when he was graduating from Konstfack a few years back. His thesis project there spawned an instant classic — the White Lies table, which features a marble-topped column with a richly saturated gradient fading down its trunk. Since then, Ross has been thinking about and working on this new collection, which he's debuting at the Milan furniture fair next week.
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tinted concrete furniture by Magnus Pettersen

Experiments in Concrete, From a Scandinavian By Way of Brazil

Magnus Pettersen's experiments in tinted concrete furniture (which is, apparently, becoming a thing) have been fascinating us ever since the Norwegian designer unveiled a pitch-perfect debut collection with his partner Lea Hein at the Stockholm Furniture Fair last year (not to mention the beautiful, blocky, sculptural seat in hues of dusky blue and yellow Pettersen recently launched with Danish design brand New Works). But to delve even deeper into the possibilities of concrete as a raw material and color as an unpredictable intervention, Pettersen recently spent 60 days at a residency in Sao Paulo, Brazil, creating 10 new works in which the brutality of concrete is tempered by the application of organic, painterly swirls of color — in much more vibrant hues than Pettersen is typically known for.
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Week of March 21, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Montreal-based beauty brand with killer aesthetics and styling, a colorblocked mirror from an unlikely source, and a little-known series by a '80s design master (above) that sent us down a major internet wormhole.
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Kathryn Bentley's midcentury Los Angeles home

Kathryn Bentley’s LA Home is a Beautiful Showcase for Talented Designers and Friends

When we think about our dream home, here are some of the things we think about: bountiful sunlight and lots of green plants; layered, colorful Moroccan rugs and deep, caramel-colored leather sofas; and tons and tons of intimately personal art, objects, and furniture made by designers we know and love. (And, let's not forget, our well-documented penchant for a great yellow and blue combo.) So imagine our surprise and delight when a sneak peek for this weekend's T Magazine hit the internet and we came face to face with all of those things packed into one beautiful, mid-century Los Angeles home — owned, no less, by jewelry designer and shop owner Kathryn Bentley of Dream Collective, a woman whose style we've admired for years.
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Gradients and Geometry in a Brooklyn Artist’s Paintings

Brooklyn-based artist Adam Henry is a painter, but you could be forgiven for assuming these works were made not by hand but by mouse. In a monograph recently published by Henry's Brussels-based gallery, Meessen de Clercq, Henry's friend, the sculptor Justin Beal, refers to the artist as having a "pre-Adobe brain, performing these Photoshop functions automatically" — blur, sharpen, flip horizontal, free transform.
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Dana Haim geometric rugs

A Sophisticated, Geometric Rug Collection With Style to Spare

This week, Brooklyn textile designer Dana Haim released the fruits of an exploration into what her dream product might be — a collection of beautiful, naturally dyed rugs, with geometric prints that reimagine traditional Zapotec patterning through a more modern and minimal lens.
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Dusen Dusen x Highlow Jewelry = Instant Outfit Magic

It might not seem, at first, that Brooklyn-based textile designer Ellen Van Dusen and LA jewelry designer Sonya Gallardo of Highlow would be kindred spirits. Dusen Dusen is best known for its endlessly colorful collection of cheerful graphic prints while Highlow's best-known project is a peach polymer clay and silk cord necklace that been marked, painted, and sculpted into different, neutral-palette iterations. But when the two are paired together, something magical happens:
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Week of March 7, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a color-blocked office interior, an automated ceramics extruder that makes a sculpture a day (but still has to wait for kiln time) and a lightning fast round-up of the art fairs last week in New York.
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Wright Design auction

Get Ready to Lust After These Wright Design Auction Finds

This month, we've been exploring the upcoming Wright Design Auction, taking place March 24, which includes some amazing lots, like a set of 1930s geometric glass candlesticks that look shockingly contemporary, and a bronze sculpture we never realized was in Mangiarotti's repertoire. Need a rabbit hole to fall down this weekend? Look no further.
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