05.13.20

Sighted

Candle Wax Tables and Mattress Foam Chairs: Tour One of the Best Waste-Material Reclamations We’ve Seen

Carsten in der Elst's recent graduate project, Heavy Duty, is every design student ever's wet dream — traveling around to different regional factories, asking them to identify their primary waste materials, then collaborating with them to use their existing production processes to turn those byproducts into something new. Unlike every other design student ever, though, in der Elst's results actually transcend his original thesis, amounting to a vast collection of objects that, if a gallery like Kreo or Friedman Benda released them from a mid-career designer, we wouldn't bat an eyelash.

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01.31.20

Sighted

Starting At Noon Today, Snag One of These Experimental Glass Vessels for Under a Grand

This week, Artsy ran an article entitled "To Attract Young Collectors, Auction Houses Tap Rock Stars, Sneakerheads, and a Spice Girl." But Canadian designer Jeff Martin is taking a slightly more subtle tack: Starting today at noon, Martin is dropping a collection of small and "extra-medium" glass objects on the new webshop for his Excavated Vessels line, which we wrote about earlier last year. While Martin's larger vessels can go for as much as $12,000 depending on the scale and complexity of the work, nothing in this collection with be over $1,000, inclusive of shipping and taxes

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Anton_Alvarez_documentation_exhibition_0007_2

10.24.19

Excerpt: Exhibition

The Soft Serve Aesthetic of Anton Alvarez’s Extruded Ceramic Sculptures

The Flavour Is So Strong — Anton Alvarez’s second solo exhibition at the Stockholm gallery Larsen Warner — opened last week, situating Alvarez’s hyper-colorful, texturally striking sculptures within a peaceful white setting at the gallery’s new space in Ostermalm. Alvarez has always been interested in formal instability, and these new objects — a continuation of his work with a kind of automated ceramic extrusion — challenge our perception of weight as well as gravity, while embracing the imperfections inherent to the process of transforming wet clay inside a kiln.

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12.17.18

Up and Coming

This Dutch Design Duo Ignores What’s “Right” in Their Quest to Make Something Perfect

Over the last few years, the Dutch studio RENS has been busy building a diverse portfolio of experimental yet resolved and alluring designs. Each project they undertake breathes new life into familiar processes and is approached from a purposefully uninformed standpoint. In fact, by knowing less about a production method and the way things “should be done,” they find the beauty and potential in rejects and mistakes.

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12.03.18

Up and Coming

A Furniture Collection in London Made From 3D Printing’s Leftovers

Years ago, when London-based designers Seongil Choi and Fabio Hendry met as students at the Royal College of Art, they were asked to make a stool — which, at the time, they had very little interest in doing. Yet by channeling their common backgrounds in industrial design and their interest in finding uses for low-value, abundant resources, they inadvertently developed an innovative process — called Hot Wire Extensions — by which they have now made many, many a stool, and so much more.

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10.16.18

Sighted

Liquefied Metal, Applied Like Spray Paint, Creates Texture in a New Collection

The London-based, Polish-born designer Marcin Rusak first rose to prominence a few years ago exploring how natural materials — and, in many cases, live ones, like flowers and bacteria — could be harnessed and transformed into a wholly new aesthetic. Now, Rusak is developing a more industrial-based offshoot called MRM (or Marcin Rusak Manufacture), and the brand's first collection takes as its starting point a similar urge to recast commonly found natural elements as something otherworldly.

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06.25.18

Studio Visit

Meet Sigve Knutson, The Rising Star of Norwegian Design

Sigve Knutson is part of a special cadre of designers who seem to emerge from art school fully formed and gallery ready, their degree projects often representing some ingenious made-up process that acts as a bellwether for where the design world is headed. His 2016 thesis project from the Design Academy Eindhoven was immediately snapped up and developed by Carwan Gallery; earlier this year, when we called out a certain lumpen aesthetic as one of the top design trends for 2018, Knutson's work was the primary reason why.

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01.18.18

Up and Coming

This Swiss Designer Blends the Rational With the Emotional to Create Some of the Most Beautiful Objects We’ve Seen

"When I started at ECAL at age 18, I actually didn’t know much about design," admits Dimitri Bähler. "As a kid, I was more interested in music, fashion, and illustration, along with biology and chemistry. In fact, I've always combined those two poles of interests: the rational and the emotional." That seems as good a way as any to describe Bähler, a young Swiss designer whose work has always seemed the result of both meticulous planning and wild experimentation. In many of his pieces, a relatively strict basic form is married to a more complex and renegade surface treatment.

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Dutch Design Week 2017 - Hardcore Exhibition

10.25.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

At Dutch Design Week, 17 Designers Turning Everyday Materials into Sculptural Furniture

It’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, and we'll be publishing a round-up of our favorites first thing next week. But for the second year in a row, one of the best exhibitions on view came from the young trend-forecasting and design firm Core Studio, who last year curated the colorful exhibition Popcore. This year, the theme was HARDCORE, and the curators asked participating designers to create works exploring "a counter-digital movement."

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05.22.17

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

We Paired Norwegian Studios with American Studios to Collaborate on New Works

In 2016, Sight Unseen’s editors created a cross-cultural exchange called Norway x New York, pairing 5 American studios with 5 Norwegian studios, who spent six months working together long-distance on objects that utilize an American workshop for fabrication. After a successful debut at Sight Unseen OFFSITE last year, Norway x New York has returned this week with an all-new collection of collaborative furniture, lighting, and accessories, pictured after the jump.

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10.21.16

Where They've Been

We Spent Two Months With 12 Artists in a Tuscan Paradise

When you tell people that you just got back from a two-month stay in a 19th-century Tuscan villa with three swimming pools where you had your own artist's studio and a gourmet chef cooking you dinner every night, the first thing they tend to do is giggle: It sounds like you're making it up. But the Villa Lena is no fairy tale, it's a very real place with a very real residency program that we participated in this summer, and documented here with the help of Berlin art director Sarah Illenberger.

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09.27.16

Up and Coming

Beautiful Objects Built to Last, By a Tech Refugee Turned Furniture Designer

Not every designer considers UI when approaching a furniture collection, but then Zürich-based Isabell Gatzen isn’t every designer: A brief stint in Silicon Valley a few years back left her disillusioned with the short product lifecycle that seems to be a hallmark of so much tech industry innovation and eager to apply strategic thinking to a more traditional craft.

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