04.12.16

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 1

Sight Unseen is on the ground at the Milan Furniture Fair this week and we’ll be bringing you loads and loads of coverage later this week! But until our rounds there are done, we’ll be featuring quick hits from some of our favorite things that caught our eye. First up: Ferrosecco, a collection of powder-coated steel vases and cups by Italian designer Federica Elmo, which we spotted at Ladies & Gentlemen, a show in the 5Vie area of Milan curated by Secondome and PS and featuring tons of SU faves like Studiopepe and Giorgia Zanellato. Love these pics, which are like mash-up of Meta Flora and Barbara Kasten.

More

04.11.16

Sighted

A Design Legend in the Making Breaks Out On His Own

When we first heard rumblings that RO/LU — the epically talented, intellectually formidable Minneapolis-based studio that we've been covering and collaborating with since its move into furniture design five years ago — was ending, we were sad but also a little excited. After all, what would its multi-disciplinary founders get up to next? This week, we got our first glimpse into RO/LU co-founder and creative director Matt Olson's new studio, called OOIEE.

More

04.09.16

Saturday Selects

Week of April 4, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we tried to restrain ourselves from posting all the Milan Furniture Fair goodness we've been gathering by sharing our top picks from Miart (above), plus recent examples of three trends we expect to see plenty of at the Salone next week: colored mirror, brushstrokes, and terrazzo.

More

04.07.16

Up and Coming

Here’s (More) Proof That Dutch Design Has Gone Super Minimal

It’s rare to come across a body of work and a design approach as radical as that of Dutch designer Tijmen Smeulders. Give his portfolio a quick browse, and you'll find only the barest essentials: dimensions, material, and year of production. Focused on technical exploration and highly sculptural, his pieces offer the viewer no explanation of their existence or even a hint as to the concept behind them — they are pure form.

More

04.06.16

Eye Candy

A New Berlin Creative Studio Puts the Art in Art Direction

Before forming the design studio Eurodance in Berlin last year, Tom Singier and Jean Leblanc worked as, respectively, an art director with his own gallery specializing in fine-art prints, and an illustrator for clients like Nokia and Louis Vuitton — hence they were both fully acclimated to existing in the grey area between form and function.

More

05.14.14

Where They've Been

Calico Wallpaper at Villa Lena

A couple before they were partners in design, Nick Cope and Rachel Mosler founded Calico Wallpaper together two years ago in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Mosler was an art therapist on paid leave from NYU's temporarily shuttered hospital; Cope ran a design/build firm whose projects had all been put on hold. "We'd always wanted to do a project that touched on both of our backgrounds — something for the home that had an art-like quality," says Cope. "Rachel studied sculpture at RISD and has a Master's in art therapy, and I went to NYU for photo and digital design." On a lazy afternoon in the East Village, Cope found an image of obscure types of paper marbling in an antique shop and brought it home. Mosler loved it and immediately began delving into the history and process of the ancient technique. "We realized quickly we had something interesting on our hands," says Cope.

More

04.05.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Series of Pastel Paintings, Inspired by Floridian Hues

In her colorful, line-driven work, Brooklyn artist Jesse Moretti has always explored the space between flatness and dimensionality, and the visual tricks one might use to create a bridge between the two. Her newest body of work, called FOAME — on view through Sunday at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York — does so quite literally: In many of her paintings, Moretti employs a shadowy line that creates the illusion of a canyon carved into the wood — or, perhaps, like an X-acto knife cut into foam.

More

04.04.16

Sighted

Seriously Modern Vibes From a Collection Inspired by Ancient Texts

With so many designers mining references from only the last decade or so, it can be weirdly refreshing to talk to someone like Nick Ross, whose influences run more towards Mesopotamia than Memphis. Ancient trade routes, Greek and Roman sculptures — these are the things that inspire the Stockholm-based, Scottish-born designer, whom we first featured when he was graduating from Konstfack a few years back. His thesis project there spawned an instant classic — the White Lies table, which features a marble-topped column with a richly saturated gradient fading down its trunk. Since then, Ross has been thinking about and working on this new collection, which he's debuting at the Milan furniture fair next week.

More

04.01.16

Saturday Selects

Week of March 28, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Little glimpses into the past (1930s ziggurat bookends), present (the colorful Danish stools above), and future (Milan furniture fair preview) of design.

More

04.01.16

Studio Visit

For Brooklyn Artist Landon Metz, Painting Takes on a New Dimension

Surprising elements — from a Duchamp readymade and postmodern tables to avant-garde music and architecture — are the seedlings with which 30-year-old Landon Metz sows his artistic philosophy. For Metz, whose studio resides in Bushwick, these are all materials that belong to the same creative ecosystem. They also provide fertile ground for his spare, lighter-than-air paintings, which tend toward the biomorphic and richly hued repeating patterns. His latest exhibition, open now through April 9th at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, centers around Metz’s affinity for the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis, one of the movement’s central figures.

More

03.31.16

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Here’s a Sneak Peek at Our 2016 Show!

Today we're excited to share the details of our Sight Unseen OFFSITE 2016 show, presented in partnership with Ford Motor Company and taking place May 13–16 on the 15th floor of the iconic Grace Building, a beautiful 20,000 square-foot space with floor-to-ceiling views onto Bryant Park below.

More

03.30.16

Sighted

Experiments in Concrete, From a Scandinavian By Way of Brazil

Magnus Pettersen's experiments in tinted concrete furniture (which is, apparently, becoming a thing) have been fascinating us ever since the Norwegian designer unveiled a pitch-perfect debut collection with his partner Lea Hein at the Stockholm Furniture Fair last year (not to mention the beautiful, blocky, sculptural seat in hues of dusky blue and yellow Pettersen recently launched with Danish design brand New Works). But to delve even deeper into the possibilities of concrete as a raw material and color as an unpredictable intervention, Pettersen recently spent 60 days at a residency in Sao Paulo, Brazil, creating 10 new works in which the brutality of concrete is tempered by the application of organic, painterly swirls of color — in much more vibrant hues than Pettersen is typically known for.

More

03.28.16

The Essentials

10 Key Designs For Your Bedroom, According to the Guys at TRNK

When the new luxury mattress brand WRIGHT decided to celebrate its launch with a pop-up shop in New York (pictured above), it tapped Tariq Dixon and Nick Nemechek of the popular online retailer TRNK to design it. Even full of revelers at WRIGHT's launch party, the space still looked so chill and lovely that we decided to invite the duo to give us a TRNK-style lesson in how to create the perfect bedroom, complete with the 10 key objects they'd recommend filling it with.

More