10.14.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Exhibition at PAD London Celebrates Marks of Imperfection and Impermanence

Marks of Existence, a new collection of collectible furniture launched this weekend at PAD London from Movimento Gallery (of London and Milan), refers to Buddhism’s three marks that characterize existence: imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness. For the show, eight of the gallery’s designers conceived of pieces using the same material — Travertino Ascolano — to celebrate asymmetry, irregularity, and the patterns, cycles, and forces of nature that can never fully be replicated or mimicked by machines or technique.

09.25.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Norwegian Studio Devised Its Own Machinery to Make These Joyful, Rainbow-Colored Stools

We learned something new today, so perhaps you will, too: The acronym for the colors of the rainbow in Norwegian is ROGGBIF, which Oslo-based Studio Sløyd has used to title its new collection of stools, as multi-colored and joyful as you’d expect from such a moniker. Comprising 24 different playful shapes, each is designed to explore applications of a newly created dyed wood technique, which founders Herman Ødegaard, Mikkel Jøraandstad, and Tim Knutsen — who decided to work together as students during a late-night karaoke session (extremely relatable) — have been developing over the past couple of years. “Rather than starting with a shape or form, we turned our usual process on its head for this project, experimenting our way to a new material,” says the trio.

06.03.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

How Do You Conceive Design That is “Correct” for Our Time? A New Exhibition Proposes Work by 10 Designers Answering the Call

Since opening in 2020, the Max Radford Gallery in London has consistently been showcasing some of the best contemporary and experimental collectible design from up-and-comers. With the Now 4 Then exhibition, ten of these designers are debuting new work at the recently opened 2000-square-foot gallery space from design store Aram. For this collaborative show, Radford was inspired by something Zeev Aram, the founder of Aram, once said regarding his enterprise, which is currently celebrating its 60th anniversary: "I decided that I will try my best to bring to the public designs which are contemporary and correct for the time.”

05.10.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

Bronze, Silk, Pine, Cherry: A Year Without a Kiln Forced Simone Bodmer-Turner to Reconsider Her Materials Palette

What does an artist do when they don’t have access to the tools their work requires? The ceramicist Simone Bodmer-Turner — celebrated for her abstract stoneware vessels and sculptures in shades of soft white or matte black — beautifully answers that question this month at Manhattan’s Emma Scully Gallery with her show of furniture and functional objects, A Year Without a Kiln.

05.07.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Modernist Villa Outside Milan Provided the Backdrop for This Stellar Showcase of Emerging Design

This year in Milan, Alcova's founders chose to host half of its exhibition in one of our all-time favorite buildings: Villa Borsani, the 1945 residence designed by Osvaldo Borsani, architect and co-founder of furniture brand Tecno, in Varedo, north of the city. Although much of Borsani’s incredible original furniture was tucked away for the occasion (a reason to go back and revisit), several designers presented impressive new works against the villa’s striking patterned marble floors, custom textiles, and that staircase. Here are a few of our favorite things we spotted there, which, coincidentally, also provides a tour of sorts around this iconic building.

05.02.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Entryway at the Kips Bay Show House Takes Wall-to-Wall Carpeting to New Heights

As a participant in this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House, New York–based designer Bennett Leifer wanted to do something that would push design boundaries, he says: “not necessarily in a way that would be loud or provocative but that would be intellectually exciting.” Soon after learning he’d be part of this year’s iteration, Leifer happened to have dinner with the team from Edward Fields Carpet Maker (who you'll remember we worked with on our Norway x New York exhibition!). He’s worked closely with the custom luxury rug brand for years and has long admired “their heritage and their vision” – the company’s storied work has been featured in many iconic settings, including Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs and the famous sunken living room of the Miller House by architect Eero Saarinen and interior designer Alexander Girard. That conversation provided the creative spark for Reframed Foyer, Leifer’s contribution to the Show House.

05.01.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

How Should We Live Now? In Milan, RISD’s Objects May Shift Exhibition Offered a Woozy Vision for Our Domestic Future

As a general rule, Milan thrives on spectacle. Some of the most memorable Salone exhibitions in recent years have relied on elaborate scenography, from Established & Sons in 2010 — when the British furniture brand filled a former Jai Alai court with walled "rooms" made from stacks of untreated tulipwood — to 2018, when Hermès constructed, over the course of three weeks inside a Milanese museum, seven towering pavilions made from thousands of jewel-toned zellige tiles. (Ask me what was inside those pavilions? Zero recollection.) So how is a student-run exhibition, from a newly founded design course exhibiting in Milan for the first time, supposed to compete? That was the conundrum facing 20 Rhode Island School of Design students, who debuted the conceptually-driven show Objects May Shift at Salone Satellite in Milan last month.

04.30.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

F Taylor Colantonio’s Solo Show in Venice Makes You Feel Like You’re in an Underwater Grotto

To enter F Taylor Colantonio’s show Frutti di Mare (literally, fruit of the sea) is to be submerged in an otherworldly environment, a kind of aquatic grotto where things are fluid and surreal. Glowing forms that have a rippling effect, as if underwater; vessels that feel like remnants of an ancient civilization or like they landed here long ago from outer space. It’s Colantonio’s solo debut with the roving gallery Object & Thing, in partnership with D.H. Office.

04.24.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

These 5 Installations in Milan Turned Materials Into the Main Event

I spent a lot of last week in Milan thinking about innovation in materials; in presentation after presentation, some of the best work to emerge from the fair came from materials companies who had hired A-plus designers to translate their raw product into something almost implausibly beautiful. From recycled aluminum to post-industrial plastic to a company that's asking us to reconsider the humble linoleum tile, here are five of our favorite materials-based projects from the week.

04.23.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

An All-Female Welding Team Built Studio Kuhlmann’s Gorgeous, Stainless Steel Ode to Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dreams, the new solo show from German designer and welder Hannah Kuhlmann, is an ode to unconscious depths, afternoon naps, and theta state reverie. On view at St Vincents gallery in Antwerp through mid-May, these pieces evoke an atmosphere somewhere between illusion and reality, following a kind of dream logic where the unexpected is encountered and absorbed. Lucid dreaming, after all, is when you realize you’re dreaming in your dream. “I wanted to capture the essence of those moments of heightened awareness within our subconscious,” Kuhlmann says. “The title Lucid Dreams speaks to the surreal experience of being both asleep and awake, where the mind wanders freely and perceptions shift.”

04.19.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

If You Like Architectural Details, You’ll Love This Comprehensive Archive of Modernist Buildings and Interiors, On View in Milan

Unless you’re very offline, design-wise, you probably know about Prague-based architecture historian and curator — as well as frequent Sight Unseen contributor! — Adam Štěch. On his well-loved Instagram account, @okolo_architecture, he’s been assiduously and beautifully cataloging 20th-century architecture and interior design details for years. His photographic efforts aren’t simply representative, they’re revelatory, and they’re currently on view as part of Salone in his Elements exhibition at Dropcity, a new center for architecture and design in Milan. By focusing on the parts — the lighting, seating, tables, railings, doors, handles, windows, floors, and more — Štěch’s 3,000 images give us a new sense of the whole: not only the larger project of how a particular building was put together in a cohesive way, but a comprehensive view of how architecture and design developed and moved throughout the last century, charting the differences and similarities of Modernist buildings over time and through place.

04.09.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

Caroline Walls’s New Exhibition — Named for a Joy Division Song — Explores the Artist’s Ideas About Intimacy and Ambiguity

Mystery and accessibility, our public and private identities, what we can only glimpse of other people and what we may not even know about ourselves — these are the puzzles at the heart of Caroline Walls’ first solo show, Touching from a Distance, at the James Makin Gallery in Melbourne. “I’m interested in how much we reveal of ourselves to the outside world, and how this can create or diminish connection and intimacy between ourselves and others,” says the New Zealand–born, Melbourne-based Walls, whose large oil paintings of striped, billowing fabric both contrast with and complement her more figurative works of the female form. Taken together, her oil paintings inhabit a space somewhere between abstraction and representation, exposing different regions of the same thematic territory: emotional intimacy.