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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See How This 3D Artist Rendered 50 Different Proposals for a Real-Life Exhibition

We've talked a lot on this site about how much 3D digital renderings have changed the game — most notably in their capacity to make the editorial photoshoot all but obsolete — but this was a new one even for us: For his first solo exhibition at the Copenhagen gallery Last Resort, Barcelona-based digital artist and designer Andrés Reisinger created more than 50 different 3D renderings for exhibition proposals before settling, with gallery director Peter Amby, on the final concept.
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Doty/Glasco at CES Gallery

We had never heard of the photography husband-and-wife team of JR Doty and Joe Glasco — or the LA gallery CES — before this exhibition announcement arrived in our inbox today, but as soon as we saw the photos we were hooked. The two photographers began collaborating professionally back in 2013, and their current work draws from an archive of more than 40,000 images that were taken on a road trip across America over the last year. Doty and Glasco photographed specific locations, like Utah and California, because of their unique geological conditions. "The images represent the essence of nature with an emphasis on the phenomena of time as it affects the landscape’s topography, such as rippling water, striations of marble and the constant changing of landforms," the press release reads.
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Örnsbergsauktionen 2013

When Fredrik Paulsen, Kristoffer Sundin, and Simon Klenell organized an auction for independent design in the basement of their Stockholm studio last year, it was with a bit of trepidation: Would anyone come? Would the pieces sell? Would the Swedish design market, with its thirst for Scandinavian midcentury classics, be open to more unique and sometimes weird works? Apparently the answer was yes on all fronts, for the Ornsbergsauktionen — which was one of our favorite exhibitions of 2012 — is back this year in conjunction with Stockholm Design Week, complete with a gorgeous new graphic identity by Bergen, a sharp new website from Konst & Teknik, and new editions by returning favorites like TAF as well as newbies (and Sight Unseen friends) Gemma Holt, Hilda Hellström, and Silo Studio. In Stockholm, the viewing is open until the night of the auction, February 8, but you can get peek of the goods above (that's Paulsen's stained pine and Valchromat Prism shelf up top) and below, as well as on the auction homepage where pre-bids are being taken.
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David Huycke’s Granulation Series

The history of the metalworking technique known as granulation stretches back some 5,000 years, to when ancient goldsmiths in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean began fusing tiny ornamental gold balls onto jewelry surfaces using a painstaking invisible soldering process. It was used to decorate the rings of the queen of Ur in the Bronze Age, perfected by the Etruscans in the 7th century BC, and resurrected in 1933 by a jewelry maker looking to copy pieces from the British Museum's collection. Yet only when the contemporary Belgian silversmith David Huycke began experimenting with the obscure technique in 1996 did it feel like granulation had finally evolved — beyond the realm of fussy antique jewelry and into the world of modern design. For Re-Thinking Granulation, Huycke's show of granulated vessels and atomic sculptures on view now at the design museum Z33 in Hasselt, Belgium, he's worked on a blown-up scale and forsaken the idea of ornamentation in favor of letting each object's form grow organically from the process used to make it.
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Ten to One, by Sylvie Zijlmans & Hewald Jongenelis

It’s not so inconceivable that a painting or sculpture would take years to complete, accumulating layers of meaning as the artist played with contour or color. But a photograph? Dutch husband-and-wife duo Sylvie Zijlmans and Hewald Jongenelis spent nearly four years on Ten to One, a large-scale photograph on view now at Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
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