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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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04.11.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Show Highlights the Appealingly Messy Side of Contemporary Ceramics

Closing in Barcelona this week is an exhibition that celebrates some of the bigger trends in contemporary ceramics these days — namely bright, drippy glazes; lumpy, organic forms; and raw, tactile, fissured surfaces. Presented by Side Gallery, “Exposed Material” is an overview of work by four artists who span several generations and hail from places ranging from America to Auckland, New Zealand.
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Isern Serra Six N. Five interior
03.08.22

Interiors

Barcelona’s Go-To Interior Designer for Turning Your Office Into an Oasis

This is the story that answers the question: What if you had to go back to the office, but your office looked just like a house? While that wouldn't solve most of the problems that bedevil workplace culture and WFH advocates, maybe it would help? The offices we're featuring today were both designed by the up-and-coming Barcelona-based interior designer Isern Serra — one for the creative studio Six N. Five, and the other the headquarters for ad agency Fuego Camina Conmigo.
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04.14.20

Sighted

The Designer Behind Your Favorite Shell-Shaped Accessories Just Dropped a New Collection

Where do you go when your last collection captured the Zeitgeist to a T? That's the dilemma that faced Rosa Rubio of the Barcelona-based Los Objetos Decorativos, whose saturated pastel ceramic seashell vases and catchalls went epically viral when they were released two years ago. For her latest collection, Rubio turned to another material that's been trending — colored glass — and again made it her own.
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03.15.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

Think Women Are Underrepresented in the Creative Arts? This Exhibition Does Too

The design world hasn't yet grappled with the chronic underrepresentation of women by brands — the Instagram @showmealist was a good idea that seems to have sadly fizzled out — but female designers and curators are doing just fine supporting each other, thankyouverymuch. The latest is an exhibition at Ox Poblenou in Barcelona, inaugurated on International Women's Day and curated by Sanna Völker, a Swedish furniture designer and curator living in Spain.
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10.17.18

At Home With

At 480 Square Feet, This Pastel Apartment in Barcelona is Tiny Yet Unbelievably Chic

Furniture designer Max Enrich’s Barcelona home is a veritable cabinet of curiosities, all exploded out into the living space. A Thonet bistro chair is suspended from the wall like a painting; a desk is filled with scissors of all varieties and ages; a stone bust adorns a bathroom counter; travertine samples are laid out as decoration; miniature chairs are arranged in a built-in, recessed display — the list could go on. And it is, after all, a list — an accumulation without seeming association, but that possesses surprising consonance.
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08.21.18

Sighted

An Architecture Photographer on Ricardo Bofill’s Social-Housing Masterpiece, Walden 7

Ricardo Bofill's Walden 7 is grouped around five courtyards and encircled by curved, terracotta balconies that give the building the appearance of having barnacles. Most of the apartments face both out towards the sea and into one of the courtyards; at many levels, a system of bridges and walkways allow residents an array of vertiginous vistas. We'd seen photos of the place, of course, but when we received these images — taken by trend consultant and travel blogger Pauline Chardin — we had to share.
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06.20.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Curator Instituted a Media Blackout to Help Visitors Enjoy Her Exhibition

While we here in the States debate whether or not Instagram has destroyed the design show (Spoiler alert: It hasn't), an exhibition in Barcelona recently confronted the issue head-on: For Perception, a group exhibition curated by designer Sanna Völker, no images of the exhibition were allowed to be published before or during the show, "in order for visitors to experience the installation without preconceptions and to allow them to create their own conclusions and impressions."
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02.01.18

Up and Coming

The Chilean Floral Artist Taking Over Your Instagram Feed

Getting ahold of Carolina Spencer isn’t easy. When she’s not designing ceramic vases, the Barcelona-based creative behind the floral Instagram sensation Matagalan is busy finessing ikebana-like installations for the foyers of the relaxed fashion label Masscob, or refreshing weekly foliage amongst the city’s flourishing cafés and coffee shops — Casa Bonay and Satan’s Coffee among them. In fact, you’re probably already familiar with her work even if you aren’t based in the Catalonian capital. In her feed, artfully balanced ceramic totems and ikebana-inspired botanicals make for an enviably satisfying scroll.
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01.17.18

Sighted

This Up-and-Coming Spanish Artist Perfectly Mixes Organic Shapes and Geometry

Like many of our subjects, Barcelona-based sculptor Carla Cascales Alimbau has one foot in the art world and one foot in design. Alimbau, who used to work for a large design corporation before developing her independent art practice in 2015, cites influences from furniture and architecture, including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Alvar Aalto. But her sculptures are in fact functionless beauties, often mixing organic shapes with geometry, and the imperfections of nature with the purity of polished materials.
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01.05.18

Up and Coming

This Swedish Illustrator’s Soft-Edged Work Might Be the Calming Influence We All Need Right Now

If you're a relatively highly attuned design person — and chances are, if you're here, you are — you might recognize the work of Swedish-born, Barcelona-based designer and illustrator Klas Ernflo (and not just because it often reminds us of another perennial SU fave, Geoff McFetridge). Ernflo's done work for Apartamento, Domus, Frame, IKEA, Mother London, Oyyo, and more, in addition to keeping up his own studio with drawings, paintings, and sculpture. But it's his latest project that we find the most fascinating.
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