14 Up-and-Coming American Designers, In a Show Curated By One of Their Own

As people whose job it is to track emerging designers — particularly those on the American scene — it's rare that we walk into a show to find incredible work by a roster of relative unknowns. And yet that's exactly what happened when I rolled up to Fernando Mastrangelo's studio in deep (deep) Brooklyn last Friday night for the opening party of In Good Company: Material Culture. It's the second exhibition Mastrangelo has curated in his space — this time alongside Architectural Digest's senior design writer Hannah Martin.
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LDF 2018 Preview: A Spotlight on Uruguayan Designers

It's nestled directly between Brazil and Buenos Aires, but you don't hear a whole lot about Uruguay in this part of the world. A new exhibition launching during the London Design Festival next week, though, is set to change that: Hilos Invisibles at Aram Gallery will give seven Montevideo studios a platform to present themselves on the global design scene, and the London-based but Uruguayan-born designer Matteo Fogale has helped groom them for their debut.
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Kueng Caputo’s Kaleidoscopic New Furniture, On View in Copenhagen

Since the beginning of their practice, the Swiss duo Kueng Caputo have been obsessed with what happens when colorful particulate matter is somehow fused together. After all, their first, attention-grabbing project was a series of chairs in which pigmented sand and mortar were hardened in a mold and then chiseled into shape. Their newest works, currently on view at Copenhagen's Étage Projects in a exhibition called Ciao Amico Mio, follow in that same vein.
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The Finnish Designer Using a Traditional Moroccan Wall-Surfacing Technique to Make Furniture

Amsterdam-based designer Tuomas Markunpoika aims for “tedious functionality” in his designs, but to us there is mystery and wonder in the bulbous, colorful slabs of material that compose his furniture. His new series of works is called “Contra Naturam,” or against nature — a mauve bench, a coffee table and chair in grayish and springy greens, and a side table and console in pale yellow and cream. Each looks cut from the earth or plucked from a stage set, at once natural and totally fake.
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These Woven, Color-Field Canvases Look Almost Like Paintings

Brooklyn artist Ethan Cook is sometimes referred to as a painter, but we've yet to find an instance of him actually putting a brush to canvas. When we first started following Cook's work, after an introduction in 2012 from Iko Iko in Los Angeles, he was manipulating canvases by way of bleaching and dyeing the fibers; he then moved on to combining hand-woven canvases with store-bought ones in a kind of super high-end, abstract patchwork. His work for the past few years, though, has involved making large-scale woven pieces entirely by hand on a four-harness floor loom — our favorite iteration yet.
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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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