Christopher Norman is Turning the Castoff Urban Trees of Los Angeles Into Art

Los Angeles–based architect and designer Christopher Norman’s new collection of hand-machined minimal forms resists standardization. His untitled “extrusions” in ash and cedar and pine riff on a hardware aesthetic, while maintaining the organic ethos seen in much of his other, more fluidly-shaped work. Forgoing pre-cut lumber, Norman uses wood from freshly cut trees. “If you’re working with commercial wood, you get a very normalized look and set of proportions. It’s basically highly mediated,” he explains.
More

Our Favorite Finds From the First-Ever Virtual Frieze Art Fair

For those in the art world, the loss of a physical Frieze means the loss of a key moment for discovery, commerce, and networking. But for those of us with no skin in the game, the virtual viewing room offers some very real benefits — like being able to browse, and read the backstory of, pieces we might have missed in the chaos of the fair, or being able to grab the exact images we want for this roundup.
More

This L.A. Artist’s Studio Is the Epitome of Calming, Meditative Vibes

For Los Angeles–born artist Cindy Hsu Zell, nature has been a lifelong inspiration. Working from her sunny North Hollywood studio, Zell creates tactile sculptures with rope, ceramic, wood, and, most recently, stone. In the midst of this confounding global crisis, we remote-toured her space and took some time to chat with her about confronting the economics of productivity, prioritizing mindful practices, and the magic of working with organic materials.
More
Mexico City designer Alberto Oderiz

The Archeology of Mexican Artist-Architect Alberto Odériz

It’s no secret that here at Sight Unseen, we have a bit of an obsession with stone and its many forms. Perhaps that’s why we’re so smitten by the work of Mexican architect and sculptor Alberto Odériz. Stone is his inspiration, his material, and his passion. From small sculptures, to full room installations, to huge plazas and other inhabitable spaces, Odériz’s work is dynamic and innovative.
More

Inside the Mind-Blowing Live/Work Compound of Mexican Artist Pedro Reyes

The sprawling studio compound of Mexican artist and designer Pedro Reyes is as much a laboratory as it is a factory — an environment with controlled variables and a given set of inputs working toward a desired outcome, whether that’s the downfall of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon or simply preserving outmoded technologies. Reyes is preoccupied not with objects in and of themselves, but how they’re made, why they’re made, and how they in turn shape us.
More

A New Jose Dávila Exhibition in A Stunning Brutalist Church

If you've ever visited König Galerie in Berlin, which is housed in a renovated 1967 Brutalist church with a skylit concrete nave, you'll know that there are only a few places in the world to experience contemporary art in such a breathtaking setting. There are also only a few artists whose work would be quite so at home in that nave as Jose Dávila, the Mexican sculptor who trained as an architect and is known for his focus on space, balance, and proportion.
More

This Dutch Artist’s Warped Archival Photos Are the Break From Reality We Need Right Now

When I first discovered the Dutch artist Koen Hauser, and his Skulptura series in particular, I viewed his work as an escape — moments of disrupted reality, primarily in the form of warps and swirls edited into photos of artworks and artifacts taken from old books and museum archives. And I liked it not only because it was weird and disorienting, but because I had rarely seen that kind of technique deployed to such beautiful effect. Yet there's actually more going on in Hauser's images.
More

A New Show Takes Inspiration From the Same Idea That Drove Duchamp and the Dadaists

For Hilda Hellström’s latest exhibition at Étage Projects, opening this Friday, the Swedish-born, Copenhagen-based artist looked to a rather unusual source for inspiration: a semi-obscure literary idea known as "pataphysics," popularized by the 19th-century French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry (and once memorably referred to as "your favorite cult artist’s favorite pseudoscience" by Pitchfork). Pataphysics is a philosophy that gives credence to that which exists even beyond the metaphysical realm — in other words, the imaginary, the irrational, and the unreal.
More

An Artist Responds to the Work of Victor Vasarely, Father of the Op-Art Movement

An internationally exhibited conceptual artist working in photography, sculpture, and installation, Oran Hoffmann was invited to the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence in 2017, where he sifted through boxes of Vasarely’s tiles, parallelograms, serigraphs, and other ephemera used to inspire and lay the groundwork for the unusual architecture of the foundation and the optically boggling sculptures and spaces within. Hoffmann’s new book is the culmination of a year of research and working with Vasarely’s archives.
More