A New Design Gallery in Berlin Gives a Long-Overdue Platform to Up-and-Coming German Studios

Despite being a longtime haven for artists and creatives — with its (formerly) cheap rents and surplus of accessible studio and exhibition spaces — Berlin never really made any sort of cohesive mark on the contemporary furniture-design world. That's why I got so excited recently when I heard about Forma, a new pop-up design gallery on the Spree river showing mostly contemporary work by mostly German or Germany-based designers like Nazara Lazaro, Carsten in der Elst, and Haus Otto — as well as why its founder, Vanessa Heepen, almost didn’t go through with it.
More

Three Exhibitions Explore a Multiplicity of Color at Salon 94 Design’s New Permanent HQ

Kwangho Lee's first-ever New York solo exhibition, which recently invaded the ground floor of Salon 94 Design's newly established permanent uptown HQ, is called Infinite Expansion. And in a way that's the best phrase we can think of to describe most of the pieces displayed over five floors of the enormous former townhouse, no matter who they're by. Each mini-exhibition shows an artist who has often dwelled on similar processes or forms throughout their career but has infused them each time with a sense of the new.
More

See Inside Maniera Gallery’s New Home, a Belgian Art Deco Masterpiece

When Belgian design gallery Maniera first opened nearly a decade ago, the works were located inside the loftlike apartment of Maniera's founders, Amaryllis Jacobs and Kwinten Lavigne. The gallery has gone through many incarnations since then — including once popping up in a famed Brutalist house in Ghent — until this spring, when it moved into its new permanent digs: the Hôtel Danckaert, also known as Villa Dewin, a landmarked Art Deco building in Brussels designed in 1922 by architect Jean-Baptiste Dewin. Maniera’s first exhibition in the space, which opened last month, features 15 new designs by artists and architects, all of which were created to respond to the gallery's imposing setting. 
More

A Barbie Pink Living Room, A Patchwork Metal Cabinet: Everything We Loved From the 2023 Collectible Fair in Brussels

Consistently one of our favorite fairs on the design circuit, the sixth edition of Collectible opened last week in a new venue in Brussels, and even from afar we were struck by the fair's continued push towards experimentation. In a new section called Dialogue, galleries were invited to show works from the '80s and '90s in conversation with more contemporary pieces (probably our favorite exhibition trope, tbh); another new section, called Architect <=> Designer, showcased only work by architects and interior designers, while a third, called New Garde, featured the best recently launched galleries and collectives.
More

Alekos Fassianos’ Hellenic Designs Offer a Fanciful Take on Ancient Greece 

The simplicity of Greek classical and folk art was an eternal muse for the late artist Alekos Fassianos. Best known for his paintings, which blend ancient iconography and contemporary scenes in vibrant swashes of blue, red, and gold, his overtly Hellenic influences and signature palette also gave birth to a wide range of furniture designs. Carwan Gallery in Athens is presenting the first retrospective of these pieces, following the artist's death last year, and they’re just as transportive and delightful as his 2D works.
More

In a Philippe Starck Retrospective, The Designer’s Early Work Reads As Both Vintage and Prescient

Before Philippe Starck became a mega-famous household name, producing everything from countertop juicers to opulent hotel lobbies and Bond-villain yachts, the French designer conceived of Postmodern furniture that feels distinctly of its time yet continues to fascinate and compel us. Starck’s work from the late '70s and '80s is now getting its first retrospective at the Ketabi Bourdet gallery in Paris. In a way, it’s the next step in the ongoing re-evaluation of designs from that era and a continuation of the conversation the gallery opened up last year with an exhibition of the visionary Italian designer Paolo Pallucco.  
More

Week of November 7, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Sophie Lou Jacobsen's new glass menorah, a terrazzo-inspired lounge chair, a '60-inspired floral furniture collab, and Alex Tieghi-Walker's new New York gallery.
More

Jacqueline Sullivan’s Tribeca Gallery Breathes New Life Into the NYC Design Scene

Gertrude Stein’s experimental text Tender Buttons is more than a hundred years old and yet it still surprises. In the book’s three sections — Objects, Food, and Rooms — Stein evokes an eclectic domestic scene that it is at once cozy and weird, making ordinary things, and language itself, strange, beguiling, and new. It’s what New York gallerist Jacqueline Sullivan is also after in her inaugural exhibition: working to reframe and refresh objects and the ways we live with them.
More
London interior designer vintage objects

In a New Gallery Space, Hollie Bowden Shows Off Her Talent for Sourcing Minimal Maximalist Vintage Objects

London-based interior designer Hollie Bowden is a self-described “minimal maximalist.” Think bare walls and airy, earth-toned environments accented and brought together with a touch of dramatic surrealism. She has a way of adding the surprising elements that wind up feeling completely necessary to any given project. After working as a stylist, florist, and set designer, Bowden launched her own studio in 2013 and has spent the past decade conceiving of dreamy domestic and retail spaces. As an extension and natural progression of her studio work, earlier this summer she opened The Gallery, an appointment-only shop located next to her Shoreditch headquarters.
More

Armel Soyer’s New Showroom is a Rustic French Fantasy

The showroom is laid out like a home, using the terracotta floor tiles, exposed ceiling beams, and iron handrails as a backdrop for its inaugural exhibition: Design at the Summit, which follows a theme first used by Armel Soyer in Megève three years previous. This second edition brings together a wide variety of the gallery’s clients, with furniture, artwork and sculpture spread across the different rooms as if someone with immaculate taste (and a fairly sizable budget) lives there amongst the collection.
More

Haos’s Steel and Plywood Collection is a Coolly Elevated Take on Minimalism

Haos's Sophie Gelinet and Cedric Gepner recently relocated from Paris to Lisbon, where they've opened a larger studio and workshop where they can make work on-site. But rather than take their practice to the furthest experimental reaches just because they can, they've instead created a pared-down, rigorous framework for their fourth collection, taking cues from traditional Japanese architecture, 20th-century Modernism, and the Dogme 95 movement, which sought to distill filmmaking to its essence by rejecting special effects and gimmicks.
More
Aaron Poritz sculptural wood furniture

Aaron Poritz’s Henry Moore–Inspired Sculptural Wood Furniture is Next Level

Aaron Poritz's latest furniture collection — Big Woods, currently on show at Cristina Grajales Gallery in New York City — is both a fond look back at his childhood spent in the forests of Massachusetts, and an evolution of years spent working with, learning about, and appreciating the material for its visual, tactile, and workable qualities. His odyssey began in Nicaragua in 2012, where a chance encounter with an exporter of hurricane-felled trees resulted in the creation of his first range of wooden furniture. Focused on joinery techniques and traditional Danish shapes, and informed by his background in architecture, however, the designer’s initial work is miles apart the Henry Moore-influenced soft curves, organic shapes, and bulbous protrusions of the sculptural designs he’s currently exhibiting. 
More