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06.07.24

Fair Report

10 Artists We Loved at New York’s Frieze, NADA, and Independent Fairs

In between the parties and the gallery openings and the furniture fairs and the dinners and the multiple Sight Unseen launches, we somehow managed to make it to three different art fairs last month — not because we felt obligated to transform them into content, but because we find stepping outside our realm to be something of a palette cleanser. That said, our taste it art tends to run on a grooved track alongside our affinities in design, and it's therefore unsurprising that the installations we found most rewarding often had elements of three-dimensionality or references to architecture, industrial design, domesticity, and the decorative arts. After the jump, find 10 of our favorite artists we discovered or became reacquainted with during our cross-disciplinary detour.
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05.06.24

Up and Coming

This New Rug Company Wants You to View Its Products as Works of Art

A serendipitous meeting in the mountains of Nepal birthed a new rug company called Maison Rhizomes, which employs the country’s expert artisans to create its colorful abstract designs based on the work of Belgian-French artist Charlotte Culot. Culot happened upon Berlin-based Hannah Vagedes up in the Himalayas in 2019, and the pair decided to join forces. By 2022 they had launched their first collection of 22 boldly patterned floor coverings, each modeled after a painting from Culot’s oeuvre, and which the duo hopes will be treated like artworks in their own right and passed down through generations.
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05.03.24

Travel

French Installation Artist Daniel Buren Has Transformed Six Hotels With Color and Sculpture

Three years ago, the LVMH-owned hotel group Belmond began working with Italy’s Galleria Continua on a program to bring the work of a diverse group of renowned artists into their 46 global properties. But midway in, they decided it could be more impactful to commission a single person for a series that would span multiple locations, and so the gallery called the famed French installation artist Daniel Buren with an ambitious proposal: to create six site-specific works in six hotels across Italy, South Africa, France, and Brazil. For Mitico, the final results of which were unveiled over the past two months, each of his installations was envisioned in direct response to the architecture or surrounding landscape of the hotels.
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02.13.24

Q+A

Artist Chidy Wayne on How Doubt and Uncertainty Guide His Hand

Barcelona-based artist Chidy Wayne boasts an assured hand, honed from years of sketching as a former fashion designer and from working for over a decade as an illustrator commissioned by big brands like Nike and Kinfolk. But his gestural paintings often start from a place of naïveté: “I close my eyes and pretend I can’t draw to truly connect with myself,” he admits.
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05.12.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Meet the NYC Art Collective Who Brought Their Explorations of “Vaguely Asian” Identities to Milan

Comprising four New York City–based artists, the collective CFGNY employs an unruly creative output to assert their own lived experience of being what they call “vaguely Asian” in America. The group recently staged an exhibition called Emporium during last month’s Milan furniture fair — presented by Italian leather brand Marséll and curated by PIN-UP magazine’s Felix Burrichter — that employs cardboard, porcelain, and leather to further complicate this idea of a blurry Asian-ness. The sculptures created with Marséll especially for the show, like leather-wrapped replicas of architectural details from Milan’s Chinatown, elucidate contact points between cultures and identity groups.
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04.13.23

Interiors

Ceramic Fireplaces and Leather Doors: Inside the Paris Atelier and Home of Valentine Schlegel

Once a forgotten name in French post-war decorative arts, the late ceramicist Valentine Schlegel came roaring back to prominence in the contemporary design and art world a few years back, becoming a muse to the likes of Simone Bodmer-Turner, Rogan Gregory, and others who appreciated her sculpted organic forms. And yet in spite of — or more likely because of — her resurgence, her longtime Paris apartment and studio was recently emptied out entirely and sold at auction. Adam Stech was lucky enough to photograph it before that happened.
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03.11.23

Saturday Selects

Week of March 6, 2023

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a show of more than 50 lamps by up-and-coming artists and designers in Brooklyn, the "most Instagrammable" restaurant interior in Tbilisi, and a home in Australia that makes the case for green-on-green-on-green (above).
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02.22.23

Fair Report

All the Best Art — and Design — We Saw at the 2023 Frieze Week in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is certainly not the most social town — compared to New York, where design and art events happen nightly and, as a professional, you could pretty much get by never paying for a glass of wine, LA's calendar can't really compete. Which is why things feel so much more exciting when Frieze comes to town each February, and suddenly your calendar fills up and you're running into interesting people left and right, multiple times a day. For those of us who crave creative stimulation, it's a boon, the time of year when galleries, stores, and makers sync up to showcase new works and new ideas. See (almost) everything we saw after the jump.
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12.13.22

Sighted

Ben Wolf Noam’s Mushroom Menorahs Were Inspired By the Intersection of Judaism and Psychedelia

Encapsulated in a school of thought called the Kabbalah, the Jewish belief in biblical mysticism isn't shared by everyone, but its theories can be compelling — and in the case of L.A. artist Ben Wolf Noam, inspiring, too. He recently launched a collection of one-of-a-kind ceramic mushroom menorahs with The Future Perfect that reference the intersection of Judaism and psychedelia, not to mention making for wildly colorful centerpieces for your holiday table. We recently chatted with him about the series and its origins.
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10.25.22

Current Obsession

Adam Stech on Italian Futurism, Part II: The 1930s Ceramics of Mazzotti and Nikolay Diulgheroff

Like many of the best art movements of the early 1900s, the radical Italian Futurist movement was most-known for two-dimensional works, but encompassed the applied arts as well. One of its more interesting — yet largely forgotten — practitioners was the late designer and artist Nikolay Diulgheroff, for whom ceramics became a medium of dynamic expression for his and the Futurists’ ideas.
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10.24.22

Current Obsession

Adam Stech on Italian Futurism, Part I: Tour Four of Italy’s Most Avant-Garde Interiors

In the 1909 manifesto for one of the most controversial avant-garde art movements of the 20th century — Italian Futurism — founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti confessed his admiration for the modern age and its inventions, for speed, the roar of engines, and the rage of war weapons. The group’s paintings and sculptures attempted to depict the speed and dynamism of the industrial age, but Futurism’s reach also extended to a practice in architecture and interior design, and in the past few years I toured Italy to uncover few of its best spaces.
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10.20.22

Sighted

In His First Work of Architecture — A Country HQ for Kvadrat — Thomas Demand Takes Inspiration From the Page

Known for his highly nuanced, opaque, anything-but-straightforward photographs of cinematically lit, full-scale sets made of paper, artist Thomas Demand’s latest project is an incredibly literal work of architecture that appears like a paper construction. The pavilion — done in partnership with Caruso St John Architects as part of the textile manufacturer Kvadrat’s headquarters in coastal Ebeltoft, Denmark — follows, as the artist says “the logic of paper."
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