Lauren Coleman Experiments with Gravity and Melting Metal in a New Skincare Campaign

Brooklyn photographer Lauren Coleman's love of science-lab equipment made her an obvious choice for an important collaboration we're debuting today: an artistic depiction of the properties of a new product by the Swiss beauty brand La Prairie, which since 1954 has been known for its scientific approach. La Prairie invited Sight Unseen to commission a series of animated cinemagrams to mark the launch, and we invited Coleman to conceptualize them.
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Simone Brewster’s Paintings Articulate the Complexity of the Female Form and Psyche

Like a creative ouroboros, Simone Brewster's practice is fluid, with each medium informing, influencing, and inspiring the other. And while the pandemic has certainly caused its share of widespread closures, cancellations, and general upheaval, in some instances it has also created surprising opportunities for creativity and experimentation. Unable to get to her studio due to lockdown protocols early on in the pandemic, Brewster decided to tackle painting, a medium she’d always been interested in but never had the time to explore — until now.
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Alteronce Gumby’s Shatteringly Optimistic Glass and Acrylic Paintings

With society’s focus on color, and especially the ways it has historically been used to label, oppress, or divide — Black and white, red and blue — Alteronce Gumby’s glass and acrylic paintings are multifaceted, glimmering beacons that propose a more nuanced perception of hue. Using foraged clear glass which the artist paints and shatters into jigsaw puzzle-sized pieces, Gumby’s latest body of work captures a hopefulness for the future — that what is broken can be put back together, for a result perhaps even more brilliant than before.
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In Bower’s New Perception-Bending Collection, Mirrors and Materials Appear to Melt Uncannily

To mark the release of their largest-ever collection of furniture and mirrors — whose wood, marble, and upholstered surfaces appear to melt over their frames — the New York studio Bower collaborated with 3-D renderer Alexis Christodolou on a series of images that capture the pieces in an escapist indoor/outdoor fantasy world. We caught up with the trio about that project and more.
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In Lucas Morten’s Hands, Scandinavian Design Becomes Something Much Darker

Swedish designer Lucas Morten’s Klot chair is sculpted from Styrofoam and his Skal vases are formed from stiffened burlap cloth. These improbable materials are the result of his general curiosity about life and his constant search for beauty. “The whole philosophy behind my objects revolves around breaking the Swedish heritage of ‘functionality first’,” he says. “I’m really inspired by the total beauty that can be found beyond practical aspects and interested in what that kind of beauty means to the human being.”
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Week of October 26, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a new Instagram auction destination, a contemporary update on Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and an extremely chic razor, for anyone still interested in grooming at this point in 2020.
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With Degree Shows Cancelled, A Stockholm Museum Offers Students the Chance to Show Their Work

With the pandemic in mind, the Stockholm-based Möbeldesignmuseum — which was founded in February 2018 by collectors and design world insiders Kersti Sandin and Lars Bülow — decided to create a platform for final year students from Beckmans, HDK-Valand, Konstfack and Malmstens. Called Ex-Works, the exhibition features work by 23 designers from the four schools, and the curated works are uniformly strong.
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This Spanish Studio Just Took the Checker Craze to the Next Level

In Masquespacio's interior for La Sastreria restaurant in Valencia, nearly every square inch of the bar area is covered in a different variation of our biggest trend prediction of the year — checkers — from your standard monochromatic Vans grid to various multicolored takes on the classic harlequin pattern. While it may seem at first like an attempt to become some kind of post-COVID Instagram Influencer pilgrimage, though, the design actually had a completely unrelated objective.
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In This Banner Year for Outdoor Art, Anders Ruhwald’s IMA Garden Installation is a Standout Favorite

At Newfields, the gardens that surround the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Detroit-based ceramicist Anders Herwald Ruhwald installed an exhibition of 10 large-scale ceramic works. Titled Century Garden, the sculptures — many of which are meant to hold plants — were tucked into the wilder, more overgrown parts of the garden; though the ceramic surfaces appeared almost tie-dyed, mottled as they were with yellows and blues, tangerine oranges and greens, they were camouflaged amongst the flowers and native plants, creating an uncanny effect.
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Week of October 19, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: furniture inspired by robots, our favorites from the 2020 Design Academy Eindhoven graduate shows, and a carpeted chair by Max Lamb that's apropos for COVID life.
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