Home metal
07.14.22

Q+A

Axel Chay Channels Man Ray Through His Erotic Bent Metal Designs

“Not a bit phallic, a lot phallic!” laughs French designer Axel Chay when I suggest his lamp slightly resembles a penis. Based on a 1920s sculpture by Surrealist artist Man Ray, the playful pink design — which I later found out is actually called Phallus — and a sconce shaped like a nipple are the most blatantly erotic and humorous of Chay’s designs. Others more subtly exude sensuality through their curves or elements entangled with one another, but are finished in bright greens, yellows, and blues so could also be interpreted in a completely different way. 
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Sight Unseen Furniture Collection Bestcase
05.12.22

Sight Unseen Presents

Cool Chromes and Candy-Colored Resin: Introducing the First Sight Unseen Furniture Collection, Created in Collaboration With Bestcase

As an editorial platform and sometimes-IRL design show, Sight Unseen has been showcasing furniture and accessories by talented designers for almost thirteen years. But it wasn't until nearly a decade in, when our old friend Charles Constantine went to co-found a metal manufacturing facility called Bestcase, that we began to wonder — wait, shouldn't we also be making furniture ourselves? After figuring out the possibilities and constraints of designing with metal, creating a '70s-inspired mood board with references to how we wanted the collection to feel — at once icy and warm, vintage-inspired, yet of the moment — and reaching out to a handful of designers who could absolutely nail this look, the resulting six-piece collection launches today, both on Sight Unseen's 1stDibs storefront and through Bestcase’s distributor network.
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04.28.22

Up and Coming

Christian + Jade Are Making the Sculptural Indoor Fireplace of Your Dreams

Since graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2018, Christian Hammer Juhl and Jade Chan — who go by the name Christian + Jade — have combined their love of material history, context, and raw expression through their Copenhagen-based studio. He’s from Denmark, she’s from Singapore, and together they’ve already developed a strong visual language centered around two very specific themes: projects based on and around fire, and those made using hammered aluminum, with several obvious overlaps. 
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Paolo Pallucco 1980s archive furniture
03.09.22

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Retrospective of 1980s Furniture Visionary Paolo Pallucco Opens in Paris

If you’ve been following the trend cycle of archive and vintage furniture over the past few years, you'll have noticed by now that the 1980s are back in a big way. We’ve recently covered a few — like Czech Modernist Bořek Šípek and Italian artist-designer Pucci de Rossi — but it seems like every month there's a new figure that's resurfaced and reevaluated in the present day. The latest is designer and manufacturer Paolo Pallucco, whose brief stint at the helm of his eponymous brand produced some of the most radical furniture of the decade — and who is now the subject of a new exhibition in Paris at Ketabi Projects.
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12.18.21

Saturday Selects

Week of December 13, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a reconstructed 1960s apartment by Ettore Sottsass opens in Milan, six London designers exhibit works in glass and metal, and Sweden's David Taylor unveils his latest collection of bent-aluminum furniture and lighting.
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09.15.21

Material

Three New Collections in Metal That Get Creative With Industrial Parts

We recently noticed a fascination, shared among three up-and-coming designers from two different parts of the globe — Sebastian Kommer, Jinyeong Yeon, and Nice Workshop — with using off-the-shelf metal materials in new, more beautiful ways. The concept itself is nothing new, but it underscores just how much endless versatility can be found in industrial parts and profiles — and how they offer emerging designers access to industrial fabrication without the expensive factory tooling and MOQs.
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06.06.18

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Furniture Collection Highlights the Color-Shifting Magic of Car Paint

A new exhibition at A Plus A Gallery in Venice, Italy, brings together artists and designers Richard Wheater, Jochen Holz, and M–L–XL in conjunction with this summer's architecture biennale. Wheater’s neon installations show off light and shapes as much as the cords and electricity themselves; Holz’s neon lights and glass objects are wild and free, with bulges and tubes composing cartoon-like moments. But the real star here is M-L-XL's new furniture collection, inspired by everyday extruded metal L-profiles and painted with holographic car paint.
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06.23.17

Sighted

The Cool Girl Cape Town Jewelry Brand At the Top of Our Wish List

Called Waif, the line is a labor of love by former ad woman and self-taught jewelry designer Gisele Human, who we've been assiduously following on Instagram, waiting for news of a new collection to drop. We got our wish this week when Human unveiled her Technicolor Melodrama collection, in which many pieces mix Human's signature metals with stones like malachite, sodalite, and Dalmatian jasper.
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07.02.16

Saturday Selects

Week of June 27, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a weirdly synchronous amount of folded metal, a colorful alternative to all those brass bottle openers, and a new way to experience an exhibition on the other side of the world.
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11.17.14

Eye Candy

Meredith Turnbull, artist

A few Saturdays ago, we featured Australian artist Meredith Turnbull's incredible, powder-coated brass jewelry, but today we wanted to turn your attention to her equally terrific art practice. Navigating her website, we became intrigued by images of totemic metallic structures that were nevertheless labeled as photography. We asked Turnbull herself to clarify: "My practice as an artist has really been shaped by my training: first studying photography, then doing a degree in Art History, then later a degree in Fine Art specializing in gold and silversmithing. This affected the way I work and made me very interested in ideas in and around discipline, functionality, art and design history, and of course context! I'm preoccupied with theories and ideas about purposeful objects and their relationship to people as well as new contexts for those ideas. So I make objects across a variety of scales. Sometimes I photograph these but only exhibit the photograph; sometimes I show small objects alongside larger installation work. I'm always trying to work with scale and the context in which I'm exhibiting."
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03.25.13

Sighted

Tom Dixon’s New Mass Coat and Book Stands

Tom Dixon has long been considered a master of metal (thanks, famously, to an early motorcycle accident requiring extensive bike repairs for which he learned, then fell in love with, welding). So we weren't the least bit surprised when we received a press release this morning revealing the London designer's newest wares — set to be released in two weeks at the Milan Furniture Fair — that contained a veritable smorgasbord of copper, cast-iron, brass, and shiny stainless steel, with a small contingent of nickel-plated aluminum tables that pair the faceting of a cut gem with the roughed-up surface of a silver ingot. There was one thing that really stood out for us, though: two minimalist brass sculptures, each an imposing 6.5 feet tall, one for holding books and the other for hanging coats. They're so different from anything we've seen Dixon show lately that they almost beg the question as to what new wunderkind he's brought on staff, but either way, they're a win. Someone with good taste, a huge budget, and high ceilings is about to make us very jealous.
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