03.09.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Retrospective of 1980s Furniture Visionary Paolo Pallucco Opens in Paris

If you’ve been following the trend cycle of archive and vintage furniture over the past few years, you'll have noticed by now that the 1980s are back in a big way. We’ve recently covered a few — like Czech Modernist Bořek Šípek and Italian artist-designer Pucci de Rossi — but it seems like every month there's a new figure that's resurfaced and reevaluated in the present day. The latest is designer and manufacturer Paolo Pallucco, whose brief stint at the helm of his eponymous brand produced some of the most radical furniture of the decade — and who is now the subject of a new exhibition in Paris at Ketabi Projects.

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03.08.22

Interiors

Barcelona’s Go-To Interior Designer for Turning Your Office Into an Oasis

This is the story that answers the question: What if you had to go back to the office, but your office looked just like a house? While that wouldn't solve most of the problems that bedevil workplace culture and WFH advocates, maybe it would help? The offices we're featuring today were both designed by the up-and-coming Barcelona-based interior designer Isern Serra — one for the creative studio Six N. Five, and the other the headquarters for ad agency Fuego Camina Conmigo.

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03.07.22

Sighted

Daniel O’Toole’s New Gradient Works Provoke a Distortion of the Senses

"Can an image feel as though it has a sound frequency embedded in it?" That is the question animating Australian artist Daniel O'Toole's latest exhibition at Modern Times, which closed this week in Melbourne. Called Cascade Rumble, and inspired by O'Toole's own experience with synesthesia, the exhibition features works that are intended to fully engulf the viewer and to "hum a frequency of sound that resonates in the mind."

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03.05.22

Saturday Selects

Week of February 28, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Virginia Sin releases the bathroom accessories of our dreams, Linde Freya Tangelder designs a $15,000 bathtub, and Hauvette & Madani complete a very modern renovation of a landmark 1926 apartment in Paris (pictured).

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03.04.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

Here Are a Few of Our Favorite Things From This Year’s Salón Cosa in CDMX

For its third edition, the burgeoning Salón COSA, Mexico’s biannual “gathering of contemporary objects,” returned to its roots in CDMX after a stint in Guadalajara last fall. On a relatively intimate scale — 22 participating artists and designers showed recent and unpublished works — Salón COSA occupied the dance floor of an old cantina nestled among the cafés, nightclubs, and shops of Calle de Motolinia, one of the oldest streets in the city. With the walls and furniture of the bar-turned-exhibition-space cloaked in a fresh coat of cerulean blue, this year’s curation reflected Salón COSA’s nocturnal setting.

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01.12.21

Up and Coming

Ok Kim Uses a Centuries-Old Korean Lacquer Technique to Make These Very 2021 Pieces

The Seoul-based artist and designer Ok Kim makes colorful contemporary art and furniture using Ottchil, a centuries-old Korean technique that’s at risk of dying out. "Ottchil" refers to the sap that seeps out of lacquer trees when cuts are made in its bark; the substance is a natural lacquer that’s mixed with fine sand and pigments to achieve a variety of durable finishes for furniture.

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03.03.22

Sighted

This Italian Furniture Brand Made a Clever Trompe L’Oeil Table, Then Shot It in a Carlo Mollino Masterpiece

January saw the introduction of an interesting new expression of trompe l'oeil, in the form of Saba Italia’s Teatro Magico table by 967 Arch, a dining table whose sinuous polyurethane base echoes the form of theater curtains and can part like them, too. The brand coincided the launch with the reopening, after a two-year renovation, of Turin’s Teatro Regio, whose Carlo Mollino–designed interior contains its own multitude of visual illusions.

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03.01.22

Up and Coming

A Young, Milan-Based Designer Inspired by the Brutalist Architecture of Eastern Europe

There are two distinct threads that run through the work of Milan-based, Macedonia-born designer Daniel Nikolovski. The first is a penchant for storytelling. His objects and furniture all seem to point to an obscure reference or emerge from a well-thought-out backstory; the forms that make up his EYE Lamps, for example, were inspired by Yugoslavian monuments, like the Brutalist buildings Kenzo Tange constructed in Nikolovski’s hometown of Skopje following an earthquake that decimated the city in 1963. The other major tenet of his work is craftsmanship, which is actually the reason he ended up in Italy at all.

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02.27.22

Saturday Selects

Week of February 21, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a Nathalie du Pasquier subway art installation in Italy, a color-blocked collection of rugs by Ethan Cook for Hay, and a new PR headquarters in London that's both deaf-friendly and vegan.

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02.25.22

Sighted

A Whimsical Parisian Shoe Store By One of France’s Biggest Up-and-Coming Talents

Sophie Dries's design for the Michel Vivien store is relatively simple, in that it centers around a 50-foot-long undulating walnut wood wall pierced with glass and wooden floating shelves. But it is the art and objects — abstract, totem-like sculptures, stools by Pierre Chapo used as pediments for displaying shoes, plush velvet seating, and lighting by Jacques Biny and Charlotte Perriand — and the way she artfully arranges them that make the space so interesting.

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02.24.22

Up and Coming

Olivia Cognet’s Very Provence–Meets–Palm Springs Ceramic Murals

With a color palette drawn largely from nature, Olivia Cognet’s aesthetic of geometric lines and sculptural excrescences is heightened by elegant crackle glazes and tactile textures. Exploring a dialogue between Brutalist influences and feminine discourse, architecture and art, Cognet's often large-scale works — from lamps to monumental bas-reliefs — embrace the irregular, inspired by her design idols, Roger Capron and Jean Derval.

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02.23.22

Fair Report

Our Favorite Exhibitions and Artworks From This Year’s Frieze Week in Los Angeles

Having attended the very first edition of the Frieze art fair's LA edition in 2019, back when it took place at Paramount Studios and gave me my first IRL glimpse of an off-duty backlot, returning three years later was a very different experience — not only has the fair itself come into its own, there's now a jam-packed Frieze Week surrounding it that was both exhilarating, and exhausting, to experience. Today we're featuring my picks from Frieze itself, but also from all the exhibitions and openings happening around town.

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02.20.22

Saturday Selects

Week of February 14, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: never-produced 1970s furniture by Gabriella Crespi reissued by Gubi, a sprawling solo show of works by Simone Bodmer-Turner, and a new wallpaper series (pictured) whose bold geometries have a painterly feel.

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