This Curator Instituted a Media Blackout to Help Visitors Enjoy Her Exhibition

While we here in the States debate whether or not Instagram has destroyed the design show (Spoiler alert: It hasn't), an exhibition in Barcelona recently confronted the issue head-on: For Perception, a group exhibition curated by designer Sanna Völker, no images of the exhibition were allowed to be published before or during the show, "in order for visitors to experience the installation without preconceptions and to allow them to create their own conclusions and impressions."
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Four Talents to Watch from Beckmans’ 2018 Graduation Show

At last year's Beckmans product-design graduation show, the Stockholm-based students were asked to create objects that went beyond their own needs. But for this year's crop of students, the overarching theme seemed to be looking inward, with projects stemming from an interrogation of their own childhoods, homes, and desires.
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At the Reform Design Biennale, Helping to Push Design in a More Radical Direction

Last summer, we received an invitation from Danish designer Maria Bruun to participate in the Reform Design Biennale, an open-call, juried design exhibition she co-founded in 2014 with her friends and colleagues, Louise Hagemenn, Rasmus Fox, and Jens Dan Johansen. The brief for designers? To create an experimental piece that might challenge their typical practice or usual methods of production — i.e., what the curators describe as doing "the illogical in order to create something logical." The results are on view starting tomorrow at Munkeruphus, just outside of Copenhagen.
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A New Furniture Collection Highlights the Color-Shifting Magic of Car Paint

A new exhibition at A Plus A Gallery in Venice, Italy, brings together artists and designers Richard Wheater, Jochen Holz, and M–L–XL in conjunction with this summer's architecture biennale. Wheater’s neon installations show off light and shapes as much as the cords and electricity themselves; Holz’s neon lights and glass objects are wild and free, with bulges and tubes composing cartoon-like moments. But the real star here is M-L-XL's new furniture collection, inspired by everyday extruded metal L-profiles and painted with holographic car paint.
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Muji Materials Garden by Ladies & Gentlemen

Ladies & Gentlemen’s MUJI Materials Garden Was a Match Made in Minimalist Heaven

For this year’s NYCxDESIGN, MUJI teamed up with Jean Lee and Dylan Davis of Ladies & Gentlemen Studio on an installation to commemorate the Japanese lifestyle brand's ten years in the U.S. — the brand’s first-ever collaboration with an American designer. Called MUJI Materials Garden, the installation was comprised of seven vignettes showcasing MUJI collection mainstays alongside the materials from which they’re made.
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Ross Hansen Volume Gallery

Resin is Having a Moment — Here’s One of Our Favorite Uses of the Material Yet

Los Angeles designer Ross Hansen has a degree in landscape architecture — as well as a current landscape practice — so it makes sense that his first solo furniture exhibition, on view now at Chicago's Volume Gallery, would hinge on man's perception of nature. Called Super Natural, the pieces in his new series explore color, form, and industrial processes through objects made from epoxy resin — a grand, flocked, deep green armoire with a protruding, block-like grid; a bumpy, brick-red chair; and a series of bowls, tables, shelves, and chairs, whose mottled, pigment-dyed patterns almost resemble florals.
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At Morgan Lehman, Two Artists Exploring the Slippery Nature of Spatial Perception

Seeing the work of photographer Erin O'Keefe and painter Matt Kleberg side by side, it’s as if they are of one mind: the brightest orangey reds, the richest teals and greens, and the textured yellows; the crisp angles, the unexpected shapes, and the lively abstractions. Their current collaboration, a two-person exhibition titled Ecstatic Vernacular on view at Morgan Lehman in New York until May 19, is a conversation between the artists and their differing mediums.
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Norwegian design in Milan — Norwegian Presence

The Norwegian Design Exhibition That’s On Our Must-Visit List

The annual Salone del Mobile is coming up sooner than we can believe, and one of the exhibitions we’re most excited for this year is Norwegian Presence. The fourth in a series of annual exhibitions put forth by Design and Architecture Norway (DOGA), Klubben (the Norwegian designers’ union), and Norwegian Crafts, this year's show is divided into three, with each part celebrating the country’s designers, craft artists, and manufacturers, respectively — essentially, every element of the country’s making community.
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An Immersive Interplay of Light and Color at Volume Gallery in Chicago

The Chicago studio Luftwerk have made a career out of exploring the interplay of color, light, and colored light, as so many artists before them have done and so many will continue to do. But the defining factor of their work has always been its interaction with architecture, whether the duo were projection-mapping a light show onto Falling Water or bouncing trippy patterns off Anish Kapoor's bean in Millennial Park. This month, however, they left behind that construct to mount their first solo gallery show, at Chicago's Volume Gallery, where it's their ideas alone that are on display.
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Detroit designer Chris Schanck at Friedman Benda

In a New Show, Chris Schanck Debuts Furniture Fit for an Alien King

If you're familiar with Detroit-based designer Chris Schanck's work, you can probably easily conjure an image of it in your mind — primitive yet shiny, lumpen yet somehow slick at the same time. Since 2011, when he was an MFA student at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Schanck has been developing and refining a technique he calls Alufoil, which is responsible for that shiny, otherworldly aesthetic — it often looks as though Schanck is making executive furniture for an alien king.
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