In a New Series, A Sicilian Still-Life Artist Says Goodbye to Beige

The Sicilian-born, London-based designer Oscar Piccolo has a self-professed obsession. He is compelled to take vases and arrange them just so, manipulating how the light shines through, meticulously moving through tableaux until arriving — ecstatically — at just the right one. This fascination, he admits, “is becoming a bit of a problem.” Yet at the core of this compulsion is a relatively simple proposition: “All in all, my work explores the relation between objects and their positioning.”

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03.02.18

Interiors

The Cape Town Artist Making 3D Renders of Our Personal Paradise

Five years ago, Alexis Christodoulou was a copywriter at an ad agency, hating his job and looking for some sort of creative release. Intrigued by a friend using SketchUp, the 3D-modeling program, Christodoulou taught himself how to use it and a whole new world suddenly opened for the Cape Town–based artist. Obsessed, he began putting all of his time into these renderings — desaturated, pastel worlds full of reflective pools, strong shapes, and the best kind of shadow-making light.

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12.21.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a New Show, 3D Printed Objects So Real They Look Fake

Called "Transitional Speculation," the show blurs the line between the digital and physical worlds even more than Wang Söderstrom's work normally does: While their 3D illustrations often have a whiff of handicraft, here, they've made tangible objects — primarily printed in 3D — that seem to take on the blobby, hyper-real aesthetic a rendering would typically have.

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10.16.17

Interiors

These 3D Interior Images Have Us Drooling Over a Tile Catalog

In the old days, this would have been one hell of an expensive photoshoot: Sourcing design icons-in-the-making from people like Lex Pott, Faye Toogood, and Sabine Marcelis; building out a set; and then painting, styling, and photographing the whole thing. But perhaps this will be known as the year when the rendered, three-dimensional image became almost more exciting — and decidedly cheaper — than the real thing, thereby making it almost de rigueur for brands to invest in these kinds of digital set-ups, no matter the product.

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12.19.16

Studio Visit

This Copenhagen Design Duo Uses 3D Software to Create Interiors — And Art

When we first encountered Swedish-born Anny Wang’s furniture and 3D illustrations via Instagram, she was fresh out of design school, where she had studied interior architecture. At the time she was moving to Copenhagen and launching her first project with Tim Söderström, her partner and a fellow 3D whiz with a background in architecture. Recently, however, the two decided to make their business partnership official, opening a Copenhagen-based studio called Wang & Söderström, where they create illustrations and animations for clients such as Nike, Refinery29, The New York Times, Apartamento and more.

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06.27.14

Sighted

Anny Wang’s 3D Illustrations

Today we posted an interview with the up-and-coming Swedish designer Anny Wang, who we found when she posted her BA project to Instagram. But Akin, that slamdunk furniture collection, is only half the story: In school, when Wang was trying to teach herself how to digitally model in 3D, she had trouble with some of the more typical programs and found herself turning to a little-known software called Luxology Modo. “People use it primarily for animation, but I began to play with it and understood I could use it as a canvas to make pictures,” Wang says. We’re presenting the resulting 3D illustrations here today, which look like some sort of mash-up between the Tumblr visual culture of today and the Archizoom movement of the early 80s.

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07.01.13

Excerpt: Exhibition

Jesse Moretti at Mondo Cane

A few weeks ago, someone on our Facebook page coined the term "zigzag expressionism" to describe the current prevailing aesthetic in art and graphic design. At the time, we laughed, gave the comment a thumbs up, and moved on. But in the weeks since, the phrase has stuck with us — and never more so than when we caught a glimpse on Instagram of the work of recent Cranbrook MFA grad Jesse Moretti, on view now at Mondo Cane gallery in New York. What we like about this phrase in general is its laughable obviousness, but in the context of Moretti's work it actually does describe not only a visual language but a thematic one as well.

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