05.03.16

Sighted

Sneak a Peek at our Collaboration with Designtex, Debuting at Collective Design!

When Collective Design invited Sight Unseen to create a special installation for the second year in a row, spotlighting new work by five independent American design studios on the rise, we knew we wanted a visual thread that might tie the collections together and add an extra dimension to the presentation. Enter Designtex, the Steelcase-owned manufacturer of textiles and wallcoverings, whose genius Made to Measure program we'd been eyeing a while, partnering as it does with some of our favorite artists, illustrators, and designers to create a totally customizable wallcoverings or textiles. For Collective Design, opening tomorrow, our five designers — Only Love Is Real, Chris Wolston, Studio Proba x Bower, and Fort Makers — will debut a collection of furniture and lighting set against a backdrop of custom wallpaper they’ve developed with Designtex especially for this show.

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04.23.16

Saturday Selects

Week of April 18, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a massive art chaser to counteract the design hangover we've had ever since Milan: new exhibitions by SU faves like Naomi Clark, Lily Stockman, Brent Wadden, Carol Bove, Kate Steciw, and more. (Plus: the amazing golden Stabile chair by Barcelonan designer Max Enrich, above, because we couldn't resist!)

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04.16.16

Fair Report

The Best of the 2016 Milan Furniture Fair, Part I

The 2016 Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone — aka the Milan furniture fair — closes today, and we were there on the ground, running around like crazy people trying to absorb a year's worth of new furniture in less than a week's time. According to our iPhones, we walked about 7.5 miles a day in our quest to scout great design. Here's the first of three posts chronicling what we found.

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04.13.16

Sight Unseen Presents

Visit Us at Collective Design This May!

From May 4 – 8 at Skylight Clarkson Sq, we are thrilled to be showing at Collective again, spotlighting ambitious new work by independent American design studios on the rise. For our 2016 showcase, Bower x Studio Proba, Chris Wolston, Fort Makers, and Only Love Is Real will debut a collection of furniture and lighting set against a backdrop of custom wallpaper developed with our amazing sponsor Designtex especially for the show.

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04.12.16

Up and Coming

This Former Acne Art Director Makes Furniture With a Graphic Eye

When we first encountered Swedish designer Erik Olovsson two years ago in the basement of Rossana Orlandi, he had but two products to his name — a wavy-lined metal and marble clothes rack and a modular, geometric shelving unit, both created in collaboration with his fellow graduate and graphic designer Kyuhyung Cho. Since then, Olovsson has been developing and tinkering with the beautiful projects he's unveiling in Milan this week.

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04.12.16

Sighted

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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04.11.16

Sighted

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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04.05.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

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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04.04.16

Sighted

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

03.30.16

Sighted

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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03.26.16

Saturday Selects

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

03.25.16

Interiors

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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