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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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12.03.14

Gift Guides

75 Gifts We’re Coveting — Ryland

Welcome to Sight Unseen’s second annual gift guide, in which each member of the Sight Unseen team will share the 25 items they’re coveting at the moment. Today's honors go to the newest third member of Sight Unseen: assistant editor Ryland Quillen. Gift guides are great because they not only tell you what cool things to buy for your loved ones but they also give you a sneak peek into the inner workings of the author's brain. For example, Ryland likes: chunks of resin embedded in things, glyphs, figurative animal prints, and long walks on a rocky beach. If you do too, this is the list for you! Happy holidays!

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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.

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03.28.16

Shopping

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.

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03.26.16

Saturday Selects

Week of March 21, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Montreal-based beauty brand with killer aesthetics and styling, a colorblocked mirror from an unlikely source, and a little-known series by a '80s design master (above) that sent us down a major internet wormhole.

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03.25.16

Interiors

Kathryn Bentley’s LA Home is a Beautiful Showcase for Talented Designers and Friends

When we think about our dream home, here are some of the things we think about: bountiful sunlight and lots of green plants; layered, colorful Moroccan rugs and deep, caramel-colored leather sofas; and tons and tons of intimately personal art, objects, and furniture made by designers we know and love. (And, let's not forget, our well-documented penchant for a great yellow and blue combo.) So imagine our surprise and delight when a sneak peek for this weekend's T Magazine hit the internet and we came face to face with all of those things packed into one beautiful, mid-century Los Angeles home — owned, no less, by jewelry designer and shop owner Kathryn Bentley of Dream Collective, a woman whose style we've admired for years.

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03.24.16

Sighted

This Instagram Turns Design Trends Into Visual Compositions

A few weeks back, we got a notification from an account called @magerlife that stopped us in our tracks: Run by 25-year-old Danish stylist Martin Ager, who's been doing sales and visual merchandising for Hay for the past three years, the feed presents visual collages of objects that are related in some way, be it form, material, or motif. The reason Ager tagged us? A significant amount of his source material is pulled, regularly, from Sight Unseen.

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03.23.16

Up and Coming

A South Korean Design Collective Making Treasure from Trash

At the heart of Craft Combine, a South Korean design collective run by four students currently studying at Hongik University, is a fascination with materials and processes from the perspective of different disciplines; between the four of them, there is expertise in photography, metalwork, product design and textiles. But what often holds those interests together is a commitment to environmental responsibility and a need to re-examine the things we throw away.

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03.22.16

Graphic Design

Gradients and Geometry in a Brooklyn Artist’s Paintings

Brooklyn-based artist Adam Henry is a painter, but you could be forgiven for assuming these works were made not by hand but by mouse. In a monograph recently published by Henry's Brussels-based gallery, Meessen de Clercq, Henry's friend, the sculptor Justin Beal, refers to the artist as having a "pre-Adobe brain, performing these Photoshop functions automatically" — blur, sharpen, flip horizontal, free transform.

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