Week of September 28, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: LRNCE makes her first lamps, a New York designer releases a Memphis-style mirror to rival the Ultrafragola, and India Mahdavi opens a project space for experimental installations like the one pictured above.
More
Juliette Wanty 3D rendered interiors

These Limited-Edition Art Prints Look Right At Home in Juliette Wanty’s Poppy, 3D-Rendered Interiors

Most designers can point to the specific starting point that inspired a space, whether it be a concept, like a Balearic disco; a singular element, like a gilded backsplash; or a particular shade of blue. For a recent 3-D rendered thought experiment, Absolut Art proposed that it could also just be a single piece of art. The Stockholm-based company, which works with up-and-coming talents to create and sell affordable, limited-edition fine art prints, asked interior stylist Juliette Wanty to design five rooms inspired by five of its collaborators.
More

This L.A. Artist’s Studio Is the Epitome of Calming, Meditative Vibes

For Los Angeles–born artist Cindy Hsu Zell, nature has been a lifelong inspiration. Working from her sunny North Hollywood studio, Zell creates tactile sculptures with rope, ceramic, wood, and, most recently, stone. In the midst of this confounding global crisis, we remote-toured her space and took some time to chat with her about confronting the economics of productivity, prioritizing mindful practices, and the magic of working with organic materials.
More

Katie Stout and the Subversion of American Craft

In her latest solo exhibition at Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami, called Sour Tasting Liquid, Katie Stout focuses her experiments exclusively in ceramics, exploring processes like slab-building, mosaic, pinching, kintsugi, and more to make a body of work that is at once figurative and abstract, logical and absurd.
More
Mexico City designer Alberto Oderiz

The Archeology of Mexican Artist-Architect Alberto Odériz

It’s no secret that here at Sight Unseen, we have a bit of an obsession with stone and its many forms. Perhaps that’s why we’re so smitten by the work of Mexican architect and sculptor Alberto Odériz. Stone is his inspiration, his material, and his passion. From small sculptures, to full room installations, to huge plazas and other inhabitable spaces, Odériz’s work is dynamic and innovative.
More

A New Jose Dávila Exhibition in A Stunning Brutalist Church

If you've ever visited König Galerie in Berlin, which is housed in a renovated 1967 Brutalist church with a skylit concrete nave, you'll know that there are only a few places in the world to experience contemporary art in such a breathtaking setting. There are also only a few artists whose work would be quite so at home in that nave as Jose Dávila, the Mexican sculptor who trained as an architect and is known for his focus on space, balance, and proportion.
More

Week of October 21, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an explosion of color in our current must-see art exhibitions, an affordable new housewares series by Philippe Malouin, and four very different takes on wooden furniture, including the table above.
More

At a Paris Gallery, Furniture and Art in Colorful Conversation

We've always been fans of exhibitions that put furniture in conversation with art, but often those exhibitions are a solo affair. On view currently at Galerie Derouillon in Paris, though, is an exhibition in which an artist and a furniture designer instead riff on one another's work: Called Conversation, the exhibition features furniture made by the French designer Frédéric Pellenq and paintings and objects by artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet.
More

This Dutch Artist’s Warped Archival Photos Are the Break From Reality We Need Right Now

When I first discovered the Dutch artist Koen Hauser, and his Skulptura series in particular, I viewed his work as an escape — moments of disrupted reality, primarily in the form of warps and swirls edited into photos of artworks and artifacts taken from old books and museum archives. And I liked it not only because it was weird and disorienting, but because I had rarely seen that kind of technique deployed to such beautiful effect. Yet there's actually more going on in Hauser's images.
More

Kim Bartelt’s Pastel Paper “Paintings” Are the Bedrock of Her Berlin Home

When Kim Bartelt was an art student at Parsons, and then a young set designer in New York, she would often collect the colored tissue paper that comes with clothing purchases from small boutiques, or wrapped around samples when calling in pieces for a photoshoot. The papers sat for years around her apartment in a giant Paul Smith bag — first in New York, then back home in Berlin — before eventually becoming the abstract "painting" that would become the basis for a body of work she's been creating for more than half a decade.
More

Week of September 9, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the latest exhibition of enigmatic work by Jonathan Muecke, several new specimens of curvy and blobby furniture, and a show of paintings by Brian Rideout whose source material is 1970s interior photography (above).
More