09.14.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

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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Kelly Behun x Barneys
09.13.16

Sighted

Kelly Behun x Barneys: A Patterned Pop-Up, Where Maximalism Prevails

For Barneys New York, Kelly Behun and her team have created an immersive pop-up and capsule collection, on view through October 31st, that translates the studio's super graphic design aesthetic into a collection of items for the home. Called A Kook Milieu, the pop-up was inspired in part by the pattern and decoration–obsessed 1970s New York gallerist Holly Solomon, who was known for blurring the line between art and design.
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09.10.16

Saturday Selects

Week of September 5, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: highlights from our trip to Oslo, an internet wormhole that led us to a Modernist jewelry icon, and a trio of store interiors that are the very definition of "warm minimalism."
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09.09.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

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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Dropbox mural by New York graphic designers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba
09.07.16

Graphic Design

A Tech-Office Mural is the Ultimate Canvas for These Graphic Designers

By now, the large-scale mural has become something of a familiar, de rigueur decoration for tech HQs — the past few years have seen everything from Trek Matthews for Dolby Labs, to Serena Mitnik-Miller for Facebook, Ian Ross for Lyft, Camille Walala (also for Facebook) and more. But this latest might be our favorite yet: Commissioned for Dropbox's 26,000-square-foot Flatiron office in New York, the mural we're featuring today is a collaboration between New York graphic designers and former Kickstarter co-workers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba of Studio Proba.
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09.19.14

The Making of

Steven Haulenbeek’s Ice-Cast Bronze Collection

We’ve heard of something being a product of its environment, but never has that phrase rung so true as it does with the pieces in Steven Haulenbeek’s Ice-Cast Bronze series, on view this month at Chicago’s Casati Gallery, which were made largely in a trough of ice outside Haulenbeek’s studio window during last winter’s deep freeze. Haulenbeek — who knows from frigid winters, having grown up and studied sculpture in Michigan and lived in Chicago for the better part of his adult life — originally conceived the series back in 2011, when he was fooling around with pouring wax into frozen puddles on Chicago’s city streets. But this winter’s extreme conditions — while providing little but consternation for everyone else — gave Haulenbeek the opportunity to take the whole operation onto a much larger scale. We recently spoke with the Chicago-based designer to find out a little more about the origins and making of his new collection.
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Sam Amoia New York interior designer
09.06.16

At Home With

Inside the Zen-like Space of One of New York’s Top Interior Designers

Walk into any number of chic boutiques in the world —the Calvin Klein flagship on Madison Avenue, Dior in London, Dover Street Market in New York — and you're bound to see the work of Samuel Amoia, the interior designer–turned–furniture phenom who's shot to stardom in the last few years making pieces that mix high and low materials, and incorporate healing minerals and crystals such as amethyst, malachite, pyrite, onyx, and agate. But there's one place you won't find many examples of Amoia's work — in the spare, textural one-bedroom Chelsea apartment he's shared for five years with his boyfriend, Enrique, and two dogs, Pig and Bruno.
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08.29.16

Sighted

These Tiny, Affordable Nudes Put a Contemporary Spin on a Classical Genre

As NG Collective Studio, sisters Laura Naples and Kristen Giorgi sell their collaborative artworks on Uprise Art, an online gallery representing up and coming talents. That's where we spotted these gestural watercolor Mini Nudes. "I played around with the concept of how, using color and shape, the nude figures could relate to modern elements that we currently see in design and fashion," Giorgi says.
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08.27.16

Saturday Selects

Week of August 22, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an upstate favorite invades the West Village, an espresso bar flourishes in Florence, and two Danish design icons make beautiful magic together (in ceramic, of course).
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08.26.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

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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Anthony Bianco Light & Space
08.25.16

Up and Coming

Everything is Illuminated: Anthony Bianco’s Cool, Contemporary Glass Lights

When it comes to working with glass, says designer Anthony Bianco, the journey, so to speak — intense, immersive, rarely improvised — is just as notable as the destination. “The material is so physically demanding,” he says. “I’ve come to appreciate the involvement and the many steps it requires, from understanding the chemistry to creating the colors.” Having discovered a passion for glass nearly two decades ago, it’s a process with which the artist is more than well acquainted.
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Brooklyn furniture studio Uhuru Tack
08.23.16

Sighted

A Brooklyn Furniture Studio Goes Minimal in Geometric Steel

When we first featured the Brooklyn design-build studio Uhuru, back in 2010, they were known for creating imaginative furniture collections out of salvaged materials, but their newest collection feels like a leap in a whole new direction. After finding success last year with a geometric blackened-steel console called Tack, they've expanded the series to include stools and end tables that would make Donald Judd proud.
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08.22.16

Excerpt: Book

Two Lost Donald Judd Interviews, Part II: On Color and Defining ‘Modernism’

Earlier this summer, when we happened to come across not one but two vibrant, late-'80s interviews with Donald Judd in the same week, we decided it was fate telling us to designate today Judd day here on the site, where we'd excerpt text from both. The second interview we're posting today comes from New York New Art, a 1989 tome that Monica unearthed at an antique mall in Nashville. The interview, with John Griffiths, took place at a Judd exhibition where the artist was showing new pieces in metal and perspex. It covers everything from why Judd began using color to whether the term "Modernism" actually means anything. Read on for more after the jump!
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