Home emerging designers
06.05.23

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sarah Burns’s Collection for Marta is Dreamy But Humble — In Other Words, a Little Midwestern

As a designer, New York–based Sarah Burns has a remarkable fluidity when it comes to scale. She can go small and intricate, like the jewelry she creates as co-owner of the Chinatown shop Old Jewelry. But she’s also adept at working with larger, place-defining forms, as with the furniture collection in her first solo show, Prairie’s Edge, now running at Marta in LA through June 10.
More
05.02.23

Sight Unseen Presents

New York Design Week, Did You Miss Us? We’re Back, With a Show of Work by 23 Designers

Predictably, the question we always get around this time of year is: Are you bringing back Offsite?! Alas, our much-loved New York design week show, which ran in some form or another from 2010-2020, is on indefinite hiatus. But this year we'll be bringing a piece of its spirit back to life: From May 18-24, Sight Unseen will host an exhibition featuring the newest additions to the Sight Unseen Collection, which comprises furniture, lighting, and objects from a stable of emerging and mid-career designers from around the world, all orderable directly through Sight Unseen. The exhibition — taking place at Voltz Clarke gallery on the Lower East Side — will feature new work by 23 designers and studios, displayed alongside the paintings of France-based artist Heather Chontos.
More
03.14.23

Fair Report

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
02.15.23

Fair Report

The Best of Stockholm Design Week 2023, Part I: Alvsjo Gard

After a three-year COVID hiatus, Stockholm Design Week returned in full force last week. And while we'll be covering the fair and its happenings around town tomorrow, today we're putting the spotlight on a new exhibition that also happened to be our favorite. Called Älvsjö Gärd, it was a showcase of experimental, research-driven, and collectible design, set across 13 rooms in one of the oldest manors in Stockholm — basically Sight Unseen catnip.
More
02.07.23

Up and Coming

The Istanbul-Based Animate Objects Makes Statement Objects, With a Surrealist Touch

We often talk about objects that have a life of their own, that shape the space around them and affect the atmosphere and tone of a room. The limited-edition décor and collectible furniture from Animate Objects – an apt name – not only seem to live and breathe, like characters in a story, but they emote, they perform. Zeynep Satik, an Istanbul-based designer, launched Animate Objects a few months ago, with the idea of creating “theatrical environments.” Think statement pieces, with a Surrealist touch, that are as functional as they are distinctive and playfully attention-getting.
More
01.25.23

American Design Hot List

The 2022 American Design Hot List, Part III

This week we announced our 10th annual American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees; get to know the third group of Hot List designers here — Ginger Gordon, Gregory Beson, Ian Collings, In Common With (pictured above), and Jialun Xiong.
More
09.29.22

Interiors

For a New Artist Residency, Five Up-And-Coming Studios Remake a Traditional House in Greece

For 4Rooms, an artist residency on the tiny Greek island of Kastellorizo, Società delle Api’s Silvia Fiorucci, alongside Salone del Mobile editorial director Annalisa Rosso, tapped four up-and-coming designers — Studio Brynjar & Veronika, Phanos Kyriacou, Julie Richoz, and UND.studio — to totally make over one room of the house each, with the French studio Superpoly taking over the common areas (including the excellent kitchen, above).
More
09.09.22

Up and Coming

“Am I Just Making the Trash of the Future?” And Other Philosophical Questions With Designer Drew Abrahamson

“I always want my work to be fun, not taken too seriously, a point of conversation,” says Australian artist and designer Drew Abrahamson. And while it definitely is, it’s thoughtful, too, and even veers, in a light-hearted way, toward the kinds of philosophical questions anyone who puts anything out into the world ought to probably ask themselves: “Am I just making the trash of the future?” Abrahamson’s answer, in his recent series “We Are All Garbage,” is pretty much yes, but concedes that there’s freedom and liberation in the act of creation, especially when it isn’t so tightly tied to the constraints of marketability. 
More
07.01.22

Fair Report

Europe’s Newest Design Fair Is In a Small City With a Big Focus on Locality and Sustainability

We were meant to attend and cover the second edition of Southern Sweden Design Days in Malmö last month, but since COVID had other plans for us, we had to catch up with the fair's program from afar instead, which included projects by studios like Malmö Upcycling Service, Lab La Bla, and Andréason & Leibel. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, many of them featured a focus on local manufacturing, local crafts, and/or locally sourced recycled materials, which not every design fair can claim.
More
06.21.22

Fair Report

The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile – Part V

Today's post — our last from this year's Milan furniture fair — takes a tour of two of our favorite reliable destinations for up-and-coming talent: Alcova, the destination founded in 2018 by Studio Vedèt founder Valentina Ciuffi and Space Caviar's Joseph Grima, and Salone Satellite, always our first stop at the fairgrounds.
More
04.29.22

Up and Coming

Rasmus Nossbring’s Glass Sculptures Look Like They Were Squeezed Through a Tube of Swedish Caviar

For Swedish glassblower Rasmus Nossbring, it’s the immersive nature of the medium that’s so compelling. "Glass moves like nothing I've ever seen before and to use it demands full attention from your whole body and mind," says the Stockholm-based artist. "It’s like super Zen and an adrenaline rush at the same time. A lot of people describe it as a dance, and I would say that on the best days I feel like I become one with the material."
More