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09.25.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

How 19 Designers Interpreted Kvadrat’s Most Famous Fabric

For My Canvas, Kvadrat asked 19 international designers to create anything they'd like using reams of the Danish textile company's colorful Canvas upholstery, created in 2012 by Italian designer Giulio Ridolfo. The show followed the familiar framework of previous Kvadrat showcases, but the items themselves were perhaps the most inventive this series has ever produced.
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08.26.17

Saturday Selects

Week of August 21, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a favorite vintage sofa pops up online, a new line of glassware catches our eye, and we found (yet another!) geometric rug you might like.
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07.11.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

These Ceramics in a Former French Salon Are the Exact Amount of ’80s Nostalgia We Need Right Now

When Italian designer Valentina Cameranesi and curator Matylda Krzykowski first saw the former hairdresser's shop in Toulon, France — where the interior design portion of the annual Design Parade festival is held this year — its windows were plastered with the word "Féminin." Perhaps it was fate, because the word is an apt reference to Cameranesi’s work, which is on view in the former salon in her first solo exhibition until September 24.
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06.19.17

Sighted

Looking for a Graphic Rug? This French Brand Makes the Best Ones We’ve Seen

Here at Sight Unseen, summer has traditionally been our quietest season, a time when we process the chaos of the spring and meditate on what our future might hold. This year, that also means unearthing stories that might have fallen by the wayside, like the new collection CC-Tapis unveiled in Milan this April. We found their showroom at the end of an epic day of walking and the cool space inside — designed for the occasion in dark lacquer and raw wool by Faye Toogood — was one of the best things we saw all week.
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Kasthall sustainable Swedish rugs
06.14.17

Q+A

This 128-Year-Old Swedish Rug Company Has Made Some of the Coolest Rugs of 2017

Much has changed in the 128 years since Kasthall debuted as the fist industrial rug factory in Sweden — but then again, some things have remained the same. The company’s woven and hand-tufted rugs are still produced in Kasthall’s original factory. Craftsmanship and high-quality materials remain hallmarks of the brand. And sustainable production has been a point of pride all along. It’s this consistency that has kept customers coming back since 1889, and it’s what’s made Kasthall a fixture in so many homes, retail spaces, hotels, and restaurants. But over the years, the company’s interest in innovation — and its just-minimalist-enough aesthetic — has attracted new generations of design enthusiasts as well.
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Nationale Portland gallery
03.23.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Portland Gallery Has Shown Only Female Artists Since the Beginning of 2017

Nationale is an art gallery in Portland, Oregon that represents eight emerging artists: four male, and four female. But since the beginning of 2017, the gallery has shown three female artists in quick succession — Amy Bernstein, a painter; Francesca Capone, a textile artist; and Emily Counts, a sculptor; whose work is everything we look for in a Sight Unseen subject — colorful, multidisciplinary, and meaningful. And while directors May Barruel and Gabi Lewton-Leopold swear that the suddenly gendered roster wasn't purposeful, it certainly feels refreshing in the current climate.
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03.04.17

Saturday Selects

Week of February 27, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a plywood paradise in Topanga Canyon, a fashion presentation outfitted with contemporary design icons, and a series of tapestries that are way too chic to be acoustic panels.
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LRNCE modern marrakech textiles
12.12.16

Eye Candy

A Belgian Textile and Fashion Designer By Way of Marrakech

With an aesthetic that's part Proenza, part Aelfie, LRNCE is the textiles and accessories label you get when a trained Belgian fashion designer moves to Marrakech. Founded in 2013 by Laurence Leenaert and inspired by tribal rituals, the line includes super modern, thickly embroidered rugs; sandals that mix materials like raffia, rope, and suede; graphic-printed kimonos; plus bags, ceramics, and other objects. In other words, traditional Moroccan handcrafts as distilled through the lens of contemporary graphics and design.
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10.28.16

Eye Candy

This New Italian Studio Makes Textiles Inspired by Modern Art

Studio Testo, founded last year in Milan by two Italian art directors and visual researchers, makes work that's easily accessible and understood — cushions, wall textiles, upholstery fabrics, and pouches that are pretty and on-trend, what with their overlapping collages of line and organic shape. But take a deep dive into the two women's Tumblr or Instagram, and you'll see an incredibly wide and varied set of influences that have been synthesized into their current aesthetic.
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07.27.16

Up and Coming

A Bauhaus-Inspired Artist Makes Color Her Primary Medium

The paintings and wall-based textiles of New York–based Senem Oezdogan are like a Venn diagram where Bauhaus and Suprematism meet — almost as if Anni Albers and Kazimir Malevich were to have a baby. Her fiber-based geometric studies — made by wrapping wood panels in natural rope, punctuated by cotton floss color blocks — are deft executions of straight lines and woven shapes that tease the eye yet retain the softness of a tapestry.
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