Week of February 3, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week was all about color: a neon acrylic and marble sandwich, an ombre basalt table, dip-dyed carpets, and more. PLUS: Design fair season marches on, moving from Paris to Stockholm, where we found the cutely graphic marble, steel and aluminum hanger system above.
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Ornsbergsauktionen 2014

If you're a longtime reader of our site, you might remember that February, despite being utterly gross in the weather department, is one of our favorite months if only for the Ornsbergsauktionen, an artist-run auction house that's taken place during each of the past three Stockholm Design Weeks. Started by Fredrik Paulsen, Simon Klenell, and Kristoffer Sundin, the auction gathers together limited editions and one-offs from designers we already know and love — Katja Pettersson, Uglycute, Silo Studio, Hilda Hillström — and always introduces us to a handful we can't wait to Google. This year, in addition to furniture and objects, the three also managed to wrangle works on paper from the Memphis Group's still-prolific Peter Shire and Nathalie du Pasquier. We've included a selection of our favorites below, but for the full catalogue, visit the (gorgeously designed) catalog website or see the objects in person if you're in Stockholm, on view through Friday!
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Assembly’s 2x Aluminum Mirror

As journalists, it’s basically our job to be professional busybodies, so there’s almost nothing that gives us a bigger thrill than when designers offer us a sneak peek at what they’re working on next. This week, those designers were the unfailingly prolific Pete Oyler and Nora Mattingly of Brooklyn-based Assembly, whose work we’ve featured extensively on the site. Their brand new piece is the 2x Aluminum Mirror, which is crafted from a solid sheet of 1/4-inch aluminum that’s been finished with two different techniques in order to create both reflective and opaque effects on the same surface. Says Oyler, “It’s part of a broader collection of work, to be released at ICFF in NYC this May, that bridges highly skilled hand and machine processes to explore extremes, subtleties, and possible outcomes within common materials.” Of course we decided to snoop around a little more and asked Oyler to tell us a bit more about it.
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Kueng Caputo: Never Too Much at Salon 94

Kueng Caputo’s first moment of fame came a few years ago from a series called “Copy,” where the two design-school friends would purposefully mimic a recently released work from a major talent by creating an exaggerated or distilled fakery of that piece. The process was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek homage to the original artists as well as a way for Sarah Kueng and Lovis Caputo to explore how those pieces had acquired their specific character or value. Whatever lessons they learned from that experiment must have stuck, for in the last two years, the Swiss design duo have released two collections that seem predestined for design greatness.
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Celine SS14 Shoes & Accessories

Okay, so maybe we're not the first place you go for news about the ready-to-wear collections, but when we saw the new Spring/Summer line from Céline, with its brash painterly strokes and squiggles, we were knocked out. Then we saw the shoes — and had to share. There's something almost '90s-architect about them — like if we'd heard the one with the tubular gold heel was designed by Zaha Hadid, we might not have batted an eye — but they somehow go beyond that into something incredibly cool. We've included the season's amazing cuffs for your perusal as well, in crumpled painted copper or Mondrian-inspired enameled brass, but for a look at the full collection, get on over to the Céline website. You won't be sorry.
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Week of January 20, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an art installation inspired by Facebook, a refined furniture collection by a Danish design student (above), and a mirror you could get lost in.
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Natalie Herrera High Gloss Ceramics

Natalie Herrera of High Gloss Ceramics

If you want to get a sense of exactly how new to the scene Natalie Herrera is — well, she just launched her online shop last night. It’s not that she’s a newly minted graduate — Herrera got a BFA from RISD in 2009, after all — it’s only that it took her this long to figure out she was really, really good at ceramics. A glimpse at her work can immediately tell you why: When you look at her forms, which have more rigorous lines than your usual wheel-thrown vessels, as well as hand-built surface decoration in the form of shapes and squiggles, it comes as no surprise that what she was doing before she stumbled into ceramics was graphic design.
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Union of Striped Yarns by Dienke Dekker

People always ask us which design fair is on our can't-miss list, and though we've never been able to make it there ourselves, we're inclined at this point to say Dutch Design Week. The work on show there is consistently kind of epic, with future design superstars springing almost fully formed each year from the Design Academy Eindhoven (see Formafantasma, Julien Carretero, and Nacho Carbonell, to name a few). Next on that list might be Dienke Dekker, a 2012 graduate whose material explorations we're featuring today. For her project the Union of Striped Yarns, which debuted at last year's DDW, Dekker used a variety of yarns — hand-dyed, industrial-printed and even non-traditional "threads" like caution tape — to explore striped patterning in textiles. Different colored and white spaces, combined with a variety of weaving methods, created the gorgeous effects on view here.
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Hanna Eshel on 1st Dibs

If you’re not in New York, you might never have heard of Hanna Eshel, the Israeli-born, 87-year-old artist who suddenly appeared in the cultural Zeitgeist this winter. We certainly hadn’t until we overheard our friend Patrick Parrish talking about her at a holiday party last month. Parrish’s Tribeca gallery is one of two spaces in Manhattan (the other being Todd Merrill) that’s simultaneously giving the talented painter–turned–sculptor a solo show, her first ever in New York. Of course, now that she’s on our radar, she’s suddenly everywhere — name-checked in hipster interiors posts and featured on 1st Dibs, in an interview we're excerpting today.
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Week of January 6, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a subscription-based travel guide with the loveliest photographs, a Memphis-inspired furniture collection by Kelly Behun (above), an Olympics-themed souvenir collection, and more.
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Rebecca Bartoshesky, prop stylist

Prop styling is a little bit like industrial design only in that some of its best practitioners never even realized it was a career until after they’d finished school. Such was the case with Rebecca Bartoshesky, an up-and-coming New York prop stylist who studied interior design at FIT.
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Eric Ashcraft, Artist

A Montana-born artist with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Eric Ashcraft is an expert in mining dualities for his mixed media pieces. In his earlier work, painted still-lifes were framed by neon bulbs, junked-out TVs became a canvas for Thomas Kinkade-like paintings, and a couch cushion turned into a lightbox. In his more recent work, though, Ashcraft seems to be blurring the lines among media even more with a series of abstract shapes in wood painted with oil and acrylic. "I began the Polytopes series by experimenting with geometrical forms, attempting to create a flexible object-space where the languages of painting and sculpture could intermingle," says the artist. "The restricted correspondence of light, surface, form, color, line, perspective, and composition are used to abstract objects and images into one another, hopefully generating meaning for a viewer through associations with fundamental aspects of perception. Essentially, the polytopes are about what they are as objects and how they are experienced." See more after the jump, and then click here for the up-and-coming artist's whole portfolio.
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