This Barcelona Studio Asked a Painter to Choose the Colors of Its New Chair

When Gerrit Rietveld designed his famed Red and Blue Chair in 1917, it wasn't red and blue at all, but plain, unstained beech wood. Only six years later, after his De Stijl collaborator Bart van der Leck suggested he add bright colors, did Rietveld create the version that went on to make history. The same is true, in a way, of the Barcelona studio AOO's Chair 8, whose colors were envisioned by painter Claudia Valsells for a recent collaborative exhibition in Spain.
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Week of January 27, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a burgundy banquette comes with a matching deeply-hued dining table, a new Brooklyn-based ceramics studio run by a couturier (or close enough), and one more memorable find from Maison & Objet.
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Inside the Mind-Blowing Live/Work Compound of Mexican Artist Pedro Reyes

The sprawling studio compound of Mexican artist and designer Pedro Reyes is as much a laboratory as it is a factory — an environment with controlled variables and a given set of inputs working toward a desired outcome, whether that’s the downfall of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon or simply preserving outmoded technologies. Reyes is preoccupied not with objects in and of themselves, but how they’re made, why they’re made, and how they in turn shape us.
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Franz West’s Hyper-Colorful Chairs Are At the Top of Our Fantasy Furniture Wishlist

It's gift guide season, and if our budget this year was $12,000 instead of $200, we would definitely be buying someone we love one of the new Franz West chairs available at David Zwirner as part of their latest online Viewing Room exhibition. The late Austrian-born artist was not known for making especially functional furniture, but these chairs might be the closest he came to pure design.
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Week of August 5, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, two cases of ceramic lamp love, a collection of stoneware vases that defy imagination, and a Milanese apartment that feels like time-traveling.
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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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At a New Show, Thomas Barger Upcycles Your IKEA Discards Into Collectible Design

At just 25 years old, Thomas Barger finds himself wrestling with the ordinary — the idea that he’ll soon be kicked off his parents’ health insurance when he turns 26 — and the extraordinary — raising a solo show of sculptural furniture, on view through March 31 at Salon 94 Design. A recent nod from Architectural Digest and a sale to prominent art dealer and collector Javier Peres also signal Barger’s ascendency into the artistic stratosphere. But while all of these realities point to his newfound adulthood, the works on display at the gallery look backwards to the underpinnings of a youth spent growing up gay on a farm in Mattoon, Illinois.
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10 Designers on Their Favorite Dining Chairs

When you love design as much as we do, it can be hard to choose your favorite, well, anything. If asked to choose our favorite dining chair of all time, for example, would we pick a luxurious Milo Baughman? Or something more classic like Breuer's Cesca chair? That's exactly the question we posed to 10 designers around the world in our role as guest editors of the second-ever issue of MOLD Magazine.
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Week of July 3, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: velvet-clad walls at the Vienna Secession, 3-D artworks having a moment, and, for good measure, Scandinavian paper porn.
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Designers Interpret the Classic Tolix A Chair

We aren't quite sure how we missed this project — considering both our affinity for the classic Tolix A chair (we might own seven (!) of them ourselves) and our affection for the designers involved — but in Milan last month, the French company celebrated its 80th anniversary and in doing so invited eight design studios to reinterpret its most famous offering.
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