05.15.21

Saturday Selects

Week of May 10, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: table lamps inspired by fancy birds, chairs just begging us to shake a leg, and wishlist-worthy wooden spoons.

More

05.13.21

Sighted

A New Collection of Expressive Rugs Channels Art Deco and the Swedish Grace Movement

The 1920s were a great decade for Swedish design and architecture, birthing the short-lived Swedish Grace movement, which combined the decorative expressiveness of Art Deco and Neo-classicism with a signature Scandinavian restraint. They were also a great decade for rugs, as talents like Eileen Gray, artist Fernand Léger, and soon-to-be-artist Francis Bacon adorned floors with vibrant geometric compositions. A new collection from the Swedish company Nordic Knots, called Art Deco, channels that magical moment in time, with three rug designs that take inspiration from the period’s ethos, shapes, and colors.

More

05.12.21

Up and Coming

The Old is New in Gippeum Roh’s Still Life–Inspired Paintings and Ceramics

Gippeum Roh’s paintings have the flattened perspective of Cézanne’s apples, the muted color palette and tight interlocking composition of a Giorgio Morandi still life, and a hint of the sensuousness of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and landscapes. Asked about the source of her visual repertoire, Roh says, “My painting is about the everyday things that I bring to my studio. I collect things and place them, just as in the long tradition of still life painting. Light and shadow; natural, cool or warm light play an important role in revealing the appearance and essence of objects.”

More

05.11.21

Fair Report

Our 15 Favorite Artists From This Year’s Hybrid Frieze Art Fair

In my ideal, art-through-a-design-lens, pandemic-less world, Frieze — and other fairs like it — would show a more equitable mix of two- and three-dimensional works, the artists themselves would be on-hand to speak about their process, and we would all be taking a gloriously sunny ferry to Randall's Island instead of hanging out in the shadow of a failed mall in Hudson Yards. That said, there was plenty to like about this year's fair.

More

05.10.21

Q+A

Caroline Denervaud’s Paintings Are a Dialogue Between Art and Dance

It was French artist Yves Klein who, in 1960, first used women’s bodies as canvases, covering them in blue paint to study the impressions they made on paper, while an orchestra played on. Swiss-born multi-disciplinary artist Caroline Denervaud’s vibrant, abstract artworks recall Klein's pioneering performative work, and also comprise the emotionally raw, humanistic approach to movement as seen in the works of visionary German dance choreographer Pina Bausch. “She was the first person who inspired me,” recalls Denervaud.

More

04.17.20

Excerpt: Book

Three Recipes for Virtuous Comfort Food, From a Fave Restaurant of New York Creatives

Right now we're all cooking at home, and all we want is virtuous comfort food — exactly the kind of food that the New York restaurant Dimes is known for. Today we're sharing three recipes from its new book, Dimes Times, all of them warm and soothing, relatively easy to make, and freezer-friendly, too. It's no sitting-at-a-Matisse-inspired-table-sipping-wheatgrass-margaritas, but it's the perfect thing for a pandemic that has deprived us of such.

More

05.08.21

Saturday Selects

Week of May 3, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a French midcentury–inspired furniture collection by fashion designer Christian Siriano, an extremely good entrant to our mental "cool flatware" list, and the Instagram-famous sofa reissue we've all been waiting for.

More

05.06.21

Graphic Design

A New Identity For an Australian Designer, and Other Graphic Design Picks For May

Each month The Brand Identity shares with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: culture-driven visuals for a Brooklyn menswear brand, a website for a tribute album to a famed Russian Poet, and a flexible graphic identity for an Australian multi-disciplinary designer (above).

More

05.05.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Blistered Leather and Melted Aluminum — Soft Baroque’s New Works Were Inspired By the Sun

After a year of pretty much everything being on hold, we’re finally seeing the fruits of some of that pre-COVID labor. For those of us here in Milan, that means projects originally slated for the canceled 2020 Design Week are at last seeing the light of day. One of the better projects to have made it out the other side is Sun City, a collaboration between PIN-UP magazine, Soft Baroque, and Marséll, the Milanese footwear brand. Set over three levels in Marséll’s headquarters in an ex-factory in the Porta Romana district, Soft Baroque debuted — during the Digital Design Days in April — a slew of new work, each piece loosely inspired by the sun.

More

05.04.21

Sighted

Molecular Biologist By Day, Ceramicist By Night: How Science Informs Abid Javed’s Art

The Hong Kong–born, London-based artist Abid Javed became a ceramicist almost by accident: While studying for his PhD in biochemistry, Javed began searching for a medium he could dabble in to fulfill a desire to make 3D forms inspired by molecules. "I considered glass initially, but it seemed too technical to pursue as a hobby," Javed recalls. "Ceramics felt and became more intuitive." A hobby soon became a full-blown art practice; the resulting series is called Pleomorphs.

More

05.03.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

Motherhood — And the Ways In Which It Challenges Us to Create — Is At the Center of This Exhibition

The idea for Egg Collective's third "Designing Women" exhibition was born long before the pandemic struck. Back in 2018, Egg's co-founders — Hilary Petrie, Crystal Ellis, and Stephanie Beamer, along with Ellis's sister, the artist Tealia Ellis Ritter — had the idea to curate a selection of female artists and designers who also happened to be mothers, and who often worked with or chafed against the constraints of motherhood in order to create.

More

05.01.21

Saturday Selects

Week of April 26, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Yves Klein–inspired mirrors by Ben and Aja Blanc, a multi-colored Dims chair remix by Dusen Dusen, and the latest purveyor of high-quality affordable art to catch our eye (above).

More

04.30.21

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Gallery Show in London Takes Wood to Unexpected Places

Maybe it's because I've been watching Ellen's Next Great Designer (which, honestly, you should be as well, it's highly entertaining and it features THREE former Sight Unseen subjects!), but an exhibition where designers riff on the range and versatility of wood feels extremely low-stakes. (Also not a knock; it's an appropriately sized brief for coming out of a year of lockdown). But that's also what makes it all the more impressive that Gallery FUMI's first exhibition of 2021, called The Beautiful Grain and featuring 11 of the gallery's artists, should be so insanely inventive.

More