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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South Korean designers Craft Combine
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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03.19.16

Saturday Selects

Week of March 14, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two new hotels with amazing designer interiors, a $135 Plexiglas table that's headed immediately for our living rooms, and the first photos of new works debuting at the AD Design show as we speak, including the Ring Chair by Bower (above).
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Dana Haim geometric rugs
03.18.16

Sighted

A Sophisticated, Geometric Rug Collection With Style to Spare

This week, Brooklyn textile designer Dana Haim released the fruits of an exploration into what her dream product might be — a collection of beautiful, naturally dyed rugs, with geometric prints that reimagine traditional Zapotec patterning through a more modern and minimal lens.
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11.20.14

Q+A

Matthias Kaiser, artist

I had a long conversation over email this week with Matthias Kaiser, whose masterful ceramic work was a personal highlight of the show I curated for Sight Unseen OFFSITE earlier this year. The exchange reaffirmed my sometimes-waning faith in ceramics, or in anything that suddenly becomes so widely hyped that it can feel like we’re too busy being professionals to remember what struck us through about the practice in the first place. Kaiser, who now lives in the Austrian countryside having previously apprenticed with Japanese master potters and spent a combined two years traveling on the Indian subcontinent, speaks with the deep humility that comes with not taking shortcuts — with digging for your own clay, for example, or moving to Isfahan to study Sufi mysticism. He compares himself to “bad clay,” talks about how losses are a part of the game, and makes a joke about beards.
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03.16.16

What They Bought

Sincerely, Tommy Is An Oasis of Chic in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn

Kai Avent-deLeon's Brookyn boutique pairs avant-garde clothing from little-known emerging fashion lines with a rotating cast of objects and accessories she finds at markets on her travels, plus things like art she sources from Etsy and from her friends, vintage housewares from the Seattle shop Mono-Ha, and chairs she designed after going down a Donald Judd rabbit hole on Pinterest a few years back. It's impossible not to get sucked in.
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03.14.16

Sighted

Dusen Dusen x Highlow Jewelry = Instant Outfit Magic

It might not seem, at first, that Brooklyn-based textile designer Ellen Van Dusen and LA jewelry designer Sonya Gallardo of Highlow would be kindred spirits. Dusen Dusen is best known for its endlessly colorful collection of cheerful graphic prints while Highlow's best-known project is a peach polymer clay and silk cord necklace that been marked, painted, and sculpted into different, neutral-palette iterations. But when the two are paired together, something magical happens:
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03.12.16

Saturday Selects

Week of March 7, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a color-blocked office interior, an automated ceramics extruder that makes a sculpture a day (but still has to wait for kiln time) and a lightning fast round-up of the art fairs last week in New York.
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Wright Design auction
03.11.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Get Ready to Lust After These Wright Design Auction Finds

This month, we've been exploring the upcoming Wright Design Auction, taking place March 24, which includes some amazing lots, like a set of 1930s geometric glass candlesticks that look shockingly contemporary, and a bronze sculpture we never realized was in Mangiarotti's repertoire. Need a rabbit hole to fall down this weekend? Look no further.
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03.10.16

Excerpt: Book

Bauhaus-Inspired Sculpture From a Master of Swiss Graphic Design

Design obsessives know the late Max Bill primarily as a major figure in the Swiss graphic design scene of the 1950s and beyond. But a new exhibition catalog from a retrospective on view earlier this year at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid reminds us that the designer was the ultimate polymath — an architect, silversmith, painter, industrial designer, and, most stunningly, sculptor of the geometric stone and metal pieces seen in the first half of this post (which sent us on a major Google Image search).
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