04.06.22

Up and Coming

Introducing Manon Steyaert, the French Artist Making Plastics Look Pretty

By now, you might be aware that latex is having a bit of a moment in the fashion world. But have you ever seen sheets of the stuff applied to — or, more specifically, becoming — the canvas? We hadn't, or at least we hadn't seen instances where it was not only used but was in fact the main event, which is precisely why we found the work of Paris-born, UK-based artist Manon Steyaert so interesting.
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Theoreme Editions Collection 02 Sight Unseen
04.05.22

Sighted

Theoreme Editions’ New Collection Features Mirror, Metallics, and a Hint of Mint

Named after a 1968 movie by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Paris-based brand Theoreme Editions describes its curatorial approach as embodying the same “fetish for form” and penchant for storytelling through art as Pasolini's radical film did. After presenting their debut collection of furniture, which we spotted during Milan Design Week in 2019 as well as at the 2020 Collectible Design Fair, founders David Giroire and Jérôme Bazzocchi invited 10 new French designers to collaborate with artisans across Europe. Intended as a continuity of the first, Collection 02 keeps a sculptural and poetic thread running through a range of numbered and limited editions.
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04.02.22

Saturday Selects

Week of March 28, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a new limited-edition program by Hem brings three of our favorite Swedish talents into the fold, a megastar mass-market designer creates marbleized housewares, and the checkerboard trend takes on an oh-so-British archetype — the toast rack. 
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04.01.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

In His First Gallery Show, Ryan Preciado Combines His Love of Wood, the 80s, and High-Gloss Finishes

L.A. designer Ryan Preciado traffics heavily in nostalgia, particularly for his own Cali upbringing: "When I was a kid, my grandpa would give me five bucks to buff and polish his cars; I bet that’s why I’m attracted to the glossy finish," he told us back in 2019. He also cited his grandmother's garden chairs, and his uncle's car-show habit, as formative design influences. All of those influences were on display in his first gallery show, A Cliff to Climb, at Canada gallery in New York earlier this month — including via a new, ultra-polished green cabinet that he created at his friend’s autobody shop. 
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03.30.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

Nathalie du Pasquier is So Much More Than the Poster Girl for Memphis Design

When a return to Memphis became the defining design trend back in 2014, a few of the movement's original members flew to the forefront of discourse once again, among them Peter Shire, Ettore Sottsass, and Nathalie du Pasquier, whose exuberant patterning became a kind of shorthand for cool around that time. (If you came home from Milan in 2014 without an NDP Wrong for Hay tote bag, were you even there?) But while Du Pasquier became pigeon-holed for that kind of blocky, frazzled look (remember when she designed for American Apparel?!), she's always been so much more than that, and the full fruits of her output as an artist are on view this month at an exhibition called "Speed Limit" at Anton Kern Gallery in New York.
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06.24.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Exhibition Asks: Can Digital Representations Eclipse the Experience of Physical Objects?

Soft Baroque's "World of Ulteriors" exhibition at Étage Projects in Copenhagen, which closes this week, features many items that are simply variations on the duo's existing work. The new conceit here is the way in which these items are presented: In each vignette, a collection of furniture sits atop a curved, zero-horizon backdrop — something akin to a seamless, but here depicting a fictional interior that's completed by Soft Baroque's domestic objects.
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03.28.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Fashion Designers Made Their Name Reinventing the Uniform. Now They’ve Turned Their Eye to Furniture

One of the more poignant collections to come out of lockdown was on view earlier this month at Nilufar Depot in Milan. Called "Scarpette and Carolino," the exhibition — conceived by the Danish-Italian duo OLDER, aka Letizia Caramia and Morten Thuesen — featured two pieces of design dreamed up during a period of pandemic isolation spent at Caramia’s father’s studio in Pietrasanta, on the seaside edge of Tuscany. “As lockdown isolation is a lonely affair, our idea was to create a small series of friends to bring us company and warmth," say the founders.
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03.26.22

Saturday Selects

Week of March 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 proliferation of interesting work out of Melbourne Design Week, a new co-working space is Brussels whose furniture looks like the above, and a quirky, corky mirror.
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03.21.22

Excerpt: Book

“Why Design Matters” is Only the Tip of the Iceberg in This Expansive Book of Interviews by Debbie Millman

If you've ever thought about starting a podcast — a design podcast, sure, but really one on any topic at all — you probably have Debbie Millman to thank for that. Millman, who started the phenomenally popular Design Matters way back in 2005, was one of the first people working in the medium — and, as I was reminded when flipping through her new book Why Design Matters, which brings together more than 50 conversations from the show's past, remains one of the best. We're excerpting one of our favorite interviews from the book, with the filmmaker, graphic designer and artist Mike Mills, here today. 
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03.19.22

Saturday Selects

Week of March 14, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Gossamer x Studio Proba make psychedelic rugs to sink into, Irish favorites Orior scale down with their limited-edition line of small homewares, and a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos–inspired furniture collection, made from waste polystyrene, is on show in Australia.  
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03.17.22

Giveaway

Win a $2,000 Huggy Chair from Sarah Ellison, Whose Furniture Is Now Available in the US

When the Australian designer Sarah Ellison released her Huggy chair two years ago, it blew up. There was only one problem: If you weren't a big-name designer with a bottomless budget, it just wasn't that easy to get one. But that all changed this winter, when Ellison partnered with Design Within Reach to make her work readily available in the US; together, they're offering one lucky Sight Unseen reader the chance to win a $2,295 Huggy chair in a choice of upholsteries. Click through to enter!
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Paolo Pallucco 1980s archive furniture
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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