In a New Show, Hilda Hellström Blurs the Line Between What is Real and What is Fake

When we first interviewed Swedish designer Hilda Hellström back in 2012, just two weeks after her graduation from London's Royal College of Art, the designer drew an interesting distinction between her work and that of her peers: While so many Hellström's age were obsessed with the properties of different materials, she was more interested in the possibilities of narrative. But a funny thing happened in the five years that have elapsed since then: Hellström hasn't been able shake her fascination with pigmented Jesmonite, the acrylic-based plaster she originally used in her breakout Sedimentation vases.
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Sunset-Inspired Color Fades Meet Slabs of Marble In This Stunning Paris Exhibition

The Belgian painter Pieter Vermeersch has been known to fill rooms with soft, colorful gradients that define architectural space in beautifully strange ways, bordering on optical illusion. Both those works and his new canvases, on view now at Galerie Perrotin, dovetail with Vermeersch's professional origins in photography in the way they deal with light and perspective — but the new works physically ground all that ethereal color with panels of heavy marble.
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This is Today Chamber Gallery

Colored Sand, Kool-Aid, and the Potential of Materials

Group exhibitions, which ask a cohort of designers to all respond to the same brief, are far too rare in the American design scene, which often favors solo presentations. That's perhaps why Chamber Gallery's exhibition model, in which an outside curator puts together a few different installments over the course of a year, feels so refreshing. Now on view at Chamber is This Is Today, Matylda Krzykowski's second installment built around the theme of collage.
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Australia Meets Asia in Daniel Emma’s Newest Collection

With the launch of their new Bling Bling Dynasty collection today, by way of an exhibition at Hugo Mitchell Gallery in Adelaide, the Australian design duo Daniel Emma have fully embraced their Asian influences for the first time, saying that it's the first of many projects in which they hope to explore their "time spent in between cultures."
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Five Must-See Fall Exhibitions

Winter is coming — before we go into our deep annual Netflix hibernation, we always make it a point to trek out to see all the gallery and museum shows we'll probably be skipping once the sky darkens and snow starts piling up. Below are our five must-see picks for this month, from the big Agnes Martin retrospective opening at the Guggenheim this weekend to a small group show of Sight Unseen favorites Chiaozza, John Hogan, Calico Wallpaper, and Amanda Ringstad.
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Pink Houses and Ombré Hot Tubs, On View at a Los Angeles Gallery

An ombré hot tub, a bubblegum pink house, gorgeous, multi-colored, woven wall-hangings — Kayne Corcoran Griffin’s current two-person show with Mika Tajima and Jean-Pascal Flavien is chock full of splashy sculptures, paintings, weavings, installations and more that are right up our alley. The two artists are fascinated with the human tendency to gather in groups, and both Tajima and Flavien create playful work that explores what happens at those sites of assembly.
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A Breathtaking Furniture Installation Staged Inside a Famed Brutalist House

When we named Jonathan Muecke to our American Design Hot list in 2014, the enigmatic Minnesota architect summed up his motivations with a 1963 George Brecht quote about seeking precision in objects — the same kind of precision, presumably, that he saw in the starkly angular 1974 Van Wassenhove House by Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens, where he recently spent a week making a new body of work for Maniera gallery.
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The Gallery Show as Studio Visit: Ana Kraš at Les Gens Heureux

Staged in an enviably spartan top-floor apartment in the heart of Copenhagen, gallery Les Gens Heureux’s current exhibition Visit allows for an intimate glimpse into the oeuvre of one of our favorite young makers, Ana Kraš. The solo exhibition features the Serbian-born photographer, illustrator, product designer, and part-time model’s most recent works, produced over the course of the last year in her adoptive hometown of New York.
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Shiny Cubes and Popsicle Sticks in a California Light & Space Artist’s Retrospective

It’s a sweltering hot day in downtown Los Angeles when I visit California Light and Space artist Peter Alexander’s career retrospective at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, but I feel immediately refreshed upon entering. It isn’t just the effect of the A/C, but also of Alexander’s geometric polyurethane sculptures, their glistening surfaces at once enticingly reflective and mysteriously opaque.
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Studies of Furniture Designed By Women, On View at Rachel Comey

If there's one person we'd trust to curate literally everything in our lives, it would probably be Rachel Comey. The fashion designer's New York and LA stores are among our favorite interiors; her pottery pop-up two winters ago was filled with ceramics favorites like Jennie Jieun Lee and Jessica Hans; and if we buy one more pair of her chunky-heeled shoes, we're going to need more closet space. So while it's unsurprising that Comey masterminded the concept behind her latest in-store exhibition, opening tonight in New York, it's still a complete and total delight: Together with her friend, illustrator Leanne Shapton, the two conceived "Seats — Studies of Furniture Designed by Women."
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A Landscape of Architectural Ceramics at Patrick Parrish Gallery

Since we first spoke to him four years ago, ceramicist Ian McDonald's pieces have gotten more architectural, more functional, and more singular — his first solo show at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York opened yesterday, and it's full of ceramic vessels made in parts and arranged within the parameters of powder-coated trays. We spoke with him about refining the old, experimenting with the new, and the satisfaction he’s found in exploring a form that resonates.
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