01.25.18

Eye Candy

Moody, Limited-Edition Pieces By a Brand-New Berlin Design Collective

Three years ago, at a café in Berlin, three friends — Joern Scheipers, David Kosock, and Bart Navarra — came up with the idea to channel their love for art and design into creating furniture. Their friendship — and their backgrounds in fashion, branding, and architecture — finally coalesced last year into VAUST, an experimental furniture and interiors studio whose first collection launched earlier this month at Der Berliner Salon.

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05.05.16

Fair Report

Fountains, Pink Daybeds, and Foam: A Tour of Our Booth at Collective

For the second year in a row, Sight Unseen is proud to be presenting at Collective Design, which opened to the public yesterday and runs through Sunday afternoon. We're smack in the middle of the fair this year, spotlighting new work by five American design studios on the rise: Bower x Studio Proba, Chris Wolston, Only Love Is Real, and Fort Makers. At the VIP opening on Tuesday night, we heard comments like "It's like Sight Unseen come to life!" "It's amazing how every booth is so different but everything goes together perfectly!" and, straight from Julianne Moore's mouth, "This is gorgeous." We couldn't agree more.

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04.05.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Series of Pastel Paintings, Inspired by Floridian Hues

In her colorful, line-driven work, Brooklyn artist Jesse Moretti has always explored the space between flatness and dimensionality, and the visual tricks one might use to create a bridge between the two. Her newest body of work, called FOAME — on view through Sunday at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York — does so quite literally: In many of her paintings, Moretti employs a shadowy line that creates the illusion of a canyon carved into the wood — or, perhaps, like an X-acto knife cut into foam.

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04.01.16

Studio Visit

For Brooklyn Artist Landon Metz, Painting Takes on a New Dimension

Surprising elements — from a Duchamp readymade and postmodern tables to avant-garde music and architecture — are the seedlings with which 30-year-old Landon Metz sows his artistic philosophy. For Metz, whose studio resides in Bushwick, these are all materials that belong to the same creative ecosystem. They also provide fertile ground for his spare, lighter-than-air paintings, which tend toward the biomorphic and richly hued repeating patterns. His latest exhibition, open now through April 9th at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, centers around Metz’s affinity for the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis, one of the movement’s central figures.

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08.06.15

Sighted

A Furniture Collection Inspired By Pick-Up Sticks

We gave you a sneak peek of Fredrik Paulsen’s solo exhibition at Paris’s Galerie Torri earlier this summer, but when we saw the Stockholm-based designer had properly photographed the whole collection, we wanted to share the results. Called Mikado — a name we assume originates from the European form of pick-up sticks — the chairs are made from simple pieces of pine that Paulsen stains a brilliant teal blue.

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04.09.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Ben Peterson’s “Nebraska”

On this site, we don't tend to feature exhibitions once they've already closed, but this one retains one of the most incredible visual archives we've seen to date, a record of objects that were as beautifully displayed as they were constructed. Ben Peterson's "Nebraska," which was on view at San Francisco's Ratio 3 gallery from January 17 to February 28, featured a series of architectural ceramic sculptures by the Oakland-based artist, painted in different, natural hues to erase traces of their clay past and to resemble something more like weathered and patinated concrete. Almost Brutalist in form, the sculptures were installed on site-specific pastel plinths, an extreme juxtaposition that somehow seemed just right.

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03.23.15

What They Bought

Julia Leonard of Either Way LA

“I sometimes think I wear too many hats,” says Julia Leonard, the Los Angeles–based artist, interior designer, curator, gallery owner, and shopkeeper, whose backyard retail venture Either Way LA — an every Sunday sale of thrifted or commissioned pieces — has recently become a hit via Instagram and word of mouth. Since moving from San Francisco a little more than four years ago, LA has offered her the chance, as it does to so many, to start over. In San Francisco, where she had studied, worked, and lived for over a decade, she had been teaching alongside her art practice. However Los Angles marked the opportunity to focus on her art, giving her a fresh perspective: “I even dress differently,” she admits wryly.

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02.09.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

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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11.07.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

Cody Hoyt at Patrick Parrish

A short post before the weekend that doubles as a public service announcement: If you're in New York this weekend, you must check out a new exhibition at Patrick Parrish Gallery by one of our favorite rising stars in the ceramics scene, Cody Hoyt. Once upon a time, the Brooklyn-based artist, who has a BFA in printmaking, was known primarily as an illustrator and painter; two years ago he made the switch to ceramics, but in his new medium, he retains hints of his former aesthetic. Hoyt's angular vessels, which are built by hand using traditional slab construction, play with almost origami-like forms. And while he had previously been making small planters better suited to tiny succulents, the new show, entitled Heavy Vessel, enabled him to go big. (Some of the new pieces are nearly two feet tall).

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10.17.14

Eye Candy

Rana Begum, Artist

With a studio based out of the UK, artist Rana Begum has exhibited around the globe, from New York to London to Dubai. And it seems fitting that a recent solo exhibition should take place at that latter city's Third Line Gallery, an exhibition space catering to contemporary Islamic art. Begum's Bangladeshi childhood informs much of her work, observing geometric repetition in traditional Islamic patterns and the way light activates the interiors of local mosques. This, combined with the conflicting forms and colors of urban society, can be seen in her most recent pieces, which mostly consist of creased sheet-metal panels, coated in bright mixtures of paint and resin, that seem to fold out from the wall. The three-dimensionality of her pieces causes light to bounce between the reflective panels and creates varying interpretations for viewers as they move about the piece. These subtle changes are what captivate viewers, ensuring each person has a completely different experience with every one of her pieces.

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10.04.14

Saturday Selects

Week of September 29, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Maybe it's just the gloomy New York weather, but today we're wishing we could be anywhere but here: a Los Angeles gallery show, a Copenhagen vintage pop-ups, or a 1950s Milanese apartment belonging to none other than Ettore Sottsass.

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09.24.14

Studio Visit

Jennie Jieun Lee, Ceramic Artist

Jennie Jieun Lee makes plenty of glossy, pretty pieces that would look lovely alongside other objects in your home, but there’s a real depth of feeling that distinguishes her work. The large ceramic masks she’s been showing in galleries have a visceral, unsettling quality and a sly humor. But even her more practical goods — plates, bowls, cups, and creamers — convey moodiness and urgency, something you don’t often find yourself saying about tableware. “I think it was because of all those years I was stuck,” she says. “It was dying to come out.”

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