Node Lights by Amsterdam’s Odd Matter

The young Amsterdam-based duo Odd Matter, who we mentioned today in a separate post dedicated to their new work at Aram Gallery, have been busy bees lately. In addition to that project, the Dutch and Bulgarian designers recently launched a series called Node, which includes four highly expressive, sculptural lamps in copper and Jesmonite with forms designed to underscore their functions.
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3D Objects Made of Everything From Cement to Jell-O

Plenty of designers who work primarily in two dimensions translate their patterns and images to textiles, but up-and-coming London designer Lucy Hardcastle's oeuvre is particularly diverse — a former textiles student, she creates three-dimensional objects, sets, and artworks made of everything from cement to Jell-O, then draws on those creations to make prints for clients like Nike and Alexander Wang.
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Stephanie Specht, Graphic Designer

People always ask where exactly we find our story subjects, and for the past two years, the most frequent answer has invariably been Instagram. And it’s true, in the case of Belgian-born graphic designer Stephanie Specht, we were fans of her @spechtstudio handle long before we ever knew who was behind it. But our interest was piqued even further in recent months after Specht got the imprimatur from two friends with an impeccable knack for collaborations: Sandeep Salter of McNally Jackson Picture Room, where Specht released an edition earlier this year, and Alex Proba, with whom Specht created this series of plant-inspired posters. 
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Week of July 13, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: very on-trend iridescent flatware and terrazzo coasters, gorgeous oil-slick vases from a recent RISD grad, and the debut of the booksleeve (pictured above), an innovation we never realized we needed until now.
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Monique Meloche, Chicago Gallerist

When Monique Meloche took a chance on opening a Chicago gallery back in 2000, she launched with a show called Homewrecker, for which she invited 30 artists to exhibit over all three floors of her Ukrainian Village townhouse. The huge turnout prompted her to find a more permanent spot, as did gentle prodding from her husband. “He was like, ‘Sorry, I don’t want people sitting on my bed watching videos on Saturday when I come home from the gym.’” But while her home is no longer on public view, it remains a kind of lived-in display of contemporary paintings, photography, and sculptural works by artists she represents along with those she simply loves. We were lucky enough to visit recently and get to know Meloche a bit better.
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Lottie Hughes, Artist

London-based Lottie Hughes graduated with a Bachelor's degree in fine art only two years ago but she’s already on our radar, thanks to an exceedingly well-kept Tumblr. “My designs were initially a way for me to come up with compositions for my paintings but the more I learned, and the more confident I became with Photoshop, these have now become the main body of my work,” says the 24-year-old designer. Hughes primarily takes inspiration from artists like Camille Walala, Atelier Bingo, Trudy Benson, and Klaus Merkel, as well as from everyday life in London. "My designs are abstract versions of what I see on a day-to-day basis — colors clashing, angles of buildings interlocking, movement and light."
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Yonatan Vinitsky at Rome’s Frutta Gallery

"Loose Ends," an exhibition by Israeli artist Yonatan Vinitsky was on view at Rome's Frutta Gallery from March until May of this year, but it will be a long time before we get these rightly amazing images out of our heads. For his solo show, the young Haifa-born, London-based artist created eight coiled-metal sculptures, which hung suspended from the ceiling, as well as eight wall-based works that represented blown-up reproductions of the kind of backseat storage pockets you find on public transportation.
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Dutch Artist Thomas Raat

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Dutch artist Thomas Raat — whose colorful and intricate compositions recall the great European modernist graphic design tradition — isn't particularly concerned with the emotional aspects of art but instead focuses purely on the visual techniques and functionality of the medium. Referencing a deep and thorough understanding of modernist philosophy and analytical thinking, Raat creates large-scale paintings and sculptures that employ the use of symmetry, repetition, and other basic principles of design to create pleasing and visually stimulating compositions.
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Michael Wilkinson’s Decay-Inspired Landscape Series

Much of the collage-based work of Glasgow artist Michael Wilkinson, according to his New York gallery Tanya Bonakdar, "examines notions of power and resistance through an intricate web of political, cultural, and personal references" — among them the "histories of art and political radicalism, Marxist theory, popular music, and punk subculture of the 1970s and 1980s" — incorporating things like survival gear and vintage photographs. Yet his new gridded Landscape pieces, which we spotted in Bonakdar's booth at Frieze New York in May, take a more subtle (and visually beautiful) approach.
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Week of July 6, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a drool-worthy closet tour, a much-anticipated nail art collaboration, and a colorful update on one of our favorite pieces of furniture, the three-legged stool from Makers & Brothers (above).
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Top 5: Beach Towels

A periodic nod to object typologies both obscure and ubiquitous, featuring five of our favorite recent examples. Today, the subject is beach towels, whose increasingly complex graphic patterns offer more ways than ever to stand out on the sand.
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English Artist Henry Jackson Newcomb

While many of his peers are busy creating digital landscapes of shapes and planes that mimic three dimensions, the young Norwich, England–based artist Henry Jackson Newcomb makes sculptural assemblages that — owing in part to the aforementioned trend — often look inspired by digital ones. Yet by incorporating elements like chunks of concrete, panels painted with unfinished-looking brushstrokes, and haphazardly taped rings of rubber tubing, Newcomb introduces an imperfect rawness that keeps his work squarely rooted in the physical world.
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