08.01.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Each Piece in Kim Mupangilai’s Debut Furniture Collection is a Meditation on Cross-Cultural Identity

Each of the pieces in Kim Mupangilaï’s debut furniture collection, on view in a solo exhibition called HUE/I/AM – HUE/AM/I through August 20 at Superhouse Vitrine, is comprised of numerous, sometimes unexpected aspects that all cohere. Without being heavy-handed, and as the name of the show implies, the collection embodies the ways we might understand and conceive of our own identities.

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07.18.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Surrealism-Tinged Exhibition Includes Flamboyant Salad Sculptures and Snail-Bedecked Stools

On view through October 1, French curator Anne-Laure Lestage has imagined a Surrealist-inspired exhibition called House of Dreamers at Villa Empain, a storied Art Deco jewel of a building in Brussels. The group show offers visitors the chance to wander through the rooms of a home furnished with imaginative objects that fall somewhere between art and design, making a case for mixing the surreal with the decorative. Here, a tablescape boasts a flamboyant salad sculpture centerpiece; there, a wooden stool is covered in spiral snail shells. In another room, ferns grow from a planter shaped like a medieval castle.

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06.30.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Design Gallery in Berlin Gives a Long-Overdue Platform to Up-and-Coming German Studios

Despite being a longtime haven for artists and creatives — with its (formerly) cheap rents and surplus of accessible studio and exhibition spaces — Berlin never really made any sort of cohesive mark on the contemporary furniture-design world. That's why I got so excited recently when I heard about Forma, a new pop-up design gallery on the Spree river showing mostly contemporary work by mostly German or Germany-based designers like Nazara Lazaro, Carsten in der Elst, and Haus Otto — as well as why its founder, Vanessa Heepen, almost didn’t go through with it.

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06.15.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

At the Venice Design Biennial, Popping Up in an Out-of-Season Beach Cabana and a 100-Year-Old Bocce Court

Behind a battered green door on a quiet canal snaking through Venice’s Dorsoduro neighbourhood, far from the shoulder-to-shoulder throngs of tourists that populate the narrow corridors close to Piazza San Marco, is the city’s last bocce court, opened over a century ago. Most days, the area’s elderly residents convene there to throw bowls, gossip, and sip apéritifs (usually a ruby red Select spritz). But for a few weeks this May and June the sports club has given up one of their precious lanes to an entirely novel endeavor, the recently opened Venice Design Biennale.

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06.14.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Controversial Seinfeld Character Inspired One of Ethan Cook’s New Paintings

The depth of color in Ethan Cook’s work is entrancing: It draws you in and then proceeds to work its spell, stirring up meaning and feeling. Cook is known for his abstract “woven paintings” in which color isn’t applied at all but is part of the canvas itself. He uses a four-harness loom to hand weave fabric, which is then stitched together and stretched on bars. But recently, Cook has been exploring additional materials and techniques, evident in his latest exhibition Entities, at the Brussels location of Nino Mier.

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06.06.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Inspired by a Children’s Poem, Giopato & Coombes’ Milan Exhibition Took Visitors on a Journey Through Memory

The children’s poem Il Cosario describes finding forgotten small items collected in pockets and looking at them with fresh eyes. Italian-British design duo Giopato & Coombes initially bought this poem for their son, but they kept a copy at their workstation because they found it so inspiring. When the time came, they used the process outlined in the poem's verses to guide 18 Pockets, an exhibition during the recent Milan Design Week that presented reimagined pieces from the pair’s back catalog and ideas that had yet to be realized, combined in multiple ways to help tell the designers’ personal stories. A journey through their own memories, you could say.

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06.05.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sarah Burns’s Collection for Marta is Dreamy But Humble — In Other Words, a Little Midwestern

As a designer, New York–based Sarah Burns has a remarkable fluidity when it comes to scale. She can go small and intricate, like the jewelry she creates as co-owner of the Chinatown shop Old Jewelry. But she’s also adept at working with larger, place-defining forms, as with the furniture collection in her first solo show, Prairie’s Edge, now running at Marta in LA through June 10.

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05.12.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Meet the NYC Art Collective Who Brought Their Explorations of “Vaguely Asian” Identities to Milan

Comprising four New York City–based artists, the collective CFGNY employs an unruly creative output to assert their own lived experience of being what they call “vaguely Asian” in America. The group recently staged an exhibition called Emporium during last month’s Milan furniture fair — presented by Italian leather brand Marséll and curated by PIN-UP magazine’s Felix Burrichter — that employs cardboard, porcelain, and leather to further complicate this idea of a blurry Asian-ness. The sculptures created with Marséll especially for the show, like leather-wrapped replicas of architectural details from Milan’s Chinatown, elucidate contact points between cultures and identity groups.

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05.11.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

This London Exhibition Highlights the Particular Pleasure of Mixing New and Historical Works

If you've read our book, you probably know by now that mixing vintage and contemporary pieces is one of the many keys to our heart. So we were excited last month to see that the East London–based gallery and design shop Spazio Leone — who we know primarily as a purveyor of wonderfully Postmodern and classic collectible pieces — was presenting new works by the Eindhoven-based Italian designer Francesco Pace of Tellurico, alongside some of the more delightful objects drawn from Spazio Leone's collection.

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04.10.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Three Exhibitions Explore a Multiplicity of Color at Salon 94 Design’s New Permanent HQ

Kwangho Lee's first-ever New York solo exhibition, which recently invaded the ground floor of Salon 94 Design's newly established permanent uptown HQ, is called Infinite Expansion. And in a way that's the best phrase we can think of to describe most of the pieces displayed over five floors of the enormous former townhouse, no matter who they're by. Each mini-exhibition shows an artist who has often dwelled on similar processes or forms throughout their career but has infused them each time with a sense of the new.

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04.03.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

See Inside Maniera Gallery’s New Home, a Belgian Art Deco Masterpiece

When Belgian design gallery Maniera first opened nearly a decade ago, the works were located inside the loftlike apartment of Maniera's founders, Amaryllis Jacobs and Kwinten Lavigne. The gallery has gone through many incarnations since then — including once popping up in a famed Brutalist house in Ghent — until this spring, when it moved into its new permanent digs: the Hôtel Danckaert, also known as Villa Dewin, a landmarked Art Deco building in Brussels designed in 1922 by architect Jean-Baptiste Dewin. Maniera’s first exhibition in the space, which opened last month, features 15 new designs by artists and architects, all of which were created to respond to the gallery's imposing setting.

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03.16.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Mysterious Glass Assemblages, On View at Marta, Were Inspired By Modernist Buildings and Corporate Architecture

Over the years, Jonah Takagi has worked with all kinds of materials, but it's glass that has preoccupied him throughout five summer residencies in the south of France, at the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Center, or CIRVA, in Marseilles. For Takagi, the experience yielded not only an unexpected love for Marseilles but also an ever-evolving series of mesmerizing angular vessels that reference, in their shape and in their texture, the Brutalist architecture of Kenzo Tange or Le Corbusier. His latest selection, a series of dusky, painterly assemblages, is on view through April 22 at Marta gallery in Los Angeles in a solo show called "Brut Vessels."

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