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01.05.18

Up and Coming

This Swedish Illustrator’s Soft-Edged Work Might Be the Calming Influence We All Need Right Now

If you're a relatively highly attuned design person — and chances are, if you're here, you are — you might recognize the work of Swedish-born, Barcelona-based designer and illustrator Klas Ernflo (and not just because it often reminds us of another perennial SU fave, Geoff McFetridge). Ernflo's done work for Apartamento, Domus, Frame, IKEA, Mother London, Oyyo, and more, in addition to keeping up his own studio with drawings, paintings, and sculpture. But it's his latest project that we find the most fascinating.
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12.08.17

Up and Coming

One of the Art World’s Biggest Rising Stars is Inspired by Design

Less than a month after we spotted a stunning unknown painting on the walls of Kai Avent-deLeon's Brooklyn brownstone in 2015, we popped into L.A.'s MAMA gallery for a random visit and instantly recognized that we were surrounded by the work of the very same artist, Mattea Perrotta. It was either kismet or an intense case of Baader-Meinhof, but what's certainly no coincidence — because we're constantly drawn to the work of artists who do — is that Perrotta finds some of her inspiration in design.
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11.28.17

Up and Coming

An Up-and-Coming Brazilian Designer On Lightness, Gravity, and the Future

“Before studying product design, I almost graduated with a business degree,” says Guilherme Wentz, the São Paulo–based designer who, in 2016, partnered with entrepreneur Rafael Gehrke to form WENTZ, a new line of furnishings, lighting, and accessories. “But at the time, I was not happy with the job and life I had. I realized I wanted to live in a simpler and maybe more disruptive way.” Since then, the up-and-coming Brazilian designer has become a serious talent to watch, what with his spare, nature-infused creations blurring the boundary between old and new.
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11.09.17

Up and Coming

These Chilean Stone Vessels Are Our Newest South American Design Obsession

While there's no official equivalent of Slow Food in the design world, there will always be something particularly nice about projects that take the same traditionally made, locally focused approach — especially when the results have as contemporary an aesthetic as Rodrigo Bravo's new Monolith Series, which was crafted by a Chilean artisan out of Chilean stone.
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11.08.17

Up and Coming

Meet the Up and Coming Finnish Illustrator Behind the Sight Unseen Suitcase Print

Earlier this year, when we began to think about who might design the pattern that would adorn the interior of the Arlo Skye x Sight Unseen suitcase, we first established a few parameters: We wanted the suitcase to be more sophisticated than playful, but to still embody the warm, colorful, graphic sensibility that we tend to favor. We needed the print to repeat, but we wanted the pattern to have the illusion of being more random. And we hoped that we might be able to shine a light on a lesser-known, up-and-coming talent.
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Bauhaus-inspired housewares by Orphan Work
11.08.17

Up and Coming

Brutalist- and Bauhaus-Inspired Housewares and Lighting From the Duo Behind Material Lust

Christian Swafford and Lauren Larson, the creative couple behind Material Lust, introduced their sister brand Orphan Work humbly enough, with a soft launch last year that had us wondering what, exactly, the brand even was. But since its debut, the label has evolved beyond its origins as “an exploration of orphaned material” and developed into a full-fledged brand: lighting, accessories, and what they call “monuments for your tabletop,” inspired at turns by Bauhaus and Brutalism, but mainly by the Vienna Secession.
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11.06.17

Up and Coming

In Melbourne, An Emerging Painter and the Art of the Abstract Nude

Those unfamiliar with the work of Melbourne artist Caroline Walls will find clues to its themes in the titles of a few noteworthy collections: She & Her, Women, Intimacy, Abstract Nudes. Walls’s art (which encompasses paintings, prints, drawings, photography, soft sculpture, and more) is both spare and completely all-consuming, depicting the female form in ways that emphasize its grace and dynamism.
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09.19.17

Up and Coming

An Emerging Melbourne Artist on Still Lifes, Surrealism, and More

One look at Sean Meilak’s Instagram, and you’ll see why the Melbourne artist has suddenly become our new talent to watch Down Under. Meilak has a way of incorporating and transfiguring familiar visual references and echoes — from antiquity to Surrealism to the Memphis group — into works that quietly hint at something less obvious or known.
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