A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the tiled cabinet of our dreams, an exhibition featuring 99 artists riffing on the piggy bank, and a sale of studio furniture either made or owned by the legendary Garry Knox Bennett. 

Exhibitions

Foliage, birds, and starry Mediterranean nights are abstracted into swirling colors and forms in Fran Aniorte’s Magical Realism show at Galerie Scene Ouverte in Paris. The tile-topped tables, large ceramic vases and painterly plates, cabinets and lamps from Aniorte, a Spanish artist and designer who divides his time between Barcelona and Istanbul, are thoroughly transporting. Up through May 27.

Also at Scene Ouverte this past month: a group show of the six artists and designers that are part of the gallery’s Young Scene Ouverte (YSO), a platform for nurturing and showcasing emerging talent. The exhibition included work from Marseilles-based Julia Chehikian, whose locally and sustainably made furniture combines minimalism with Mediterranean warmth. Anna Zimmerman, from Vienna, sees supposed flaws as points of beauty and fascination in her aluminum Vessels of Imperfection series. Parisian Clémence Mars takes a sci-fi, scenographic approach to her sculptural furniture and objects that feel both organic and futuristic. Ceramics-focused Studio Biskt, cofounded by Charlotte Gigan and Martin Duchêne, is energized by the contrast between the industrial and the handmade in their experimental approach to material research. Artist and ceramicist Rinke Joosten, based in Rotterdam, prizes craftsmanship, and her Momentum collection explores the interplay of ceramics and blown glass in forms that retain a molten quality long after they’ve cooled. And Faustine de Longueil channels her graphic design skills into creating striking handcrafted wool rugs in her Paris workshop.

Sanayi313, the Turkish design studio founded by Enis Karavil, made its Paris debut earlier in March at Matter and Shape with an expanded version of their 313 Collection, that pairs ash burl veneer and glossy black lacquer or, in the case of the daybed and lounge chair, black leather. The Istanbul studio introduced a three-panel folding screen, made their first foray into lighting with the pillar-like 08313 floor lamp, and added accessories to the mix – bookrests, jewelry boxes, and stackable trays (the latter two are a bit like scaled down versions of the 30313 Coffee Table).

Building on the success of last year’s egg cup showcase, The Piggy Bank show at Yowie in Philadelphia, opening this week, will feature 99 artists riffing on portable money storage. Most of the participants hail from Philly but the show includes select pieces from New York, Japan, and London; our favorite might be the one with change in the couch cushions!

Discoveries

Woodworker and furniture maker Garry Knox Bennett and Sylvia Bennett, his wife, amassed an incredible collection of studio furniture, which went up for sale at Los Angeles Modern Auctions last week. The lot featured works by Bennett himself – like a 2013 chair and desk of rosewood and African mahogany – along with slightly surreal pieces by legends of the American Studio Craft Movement. Included in the treasure trove: a glass and bronze Judy Kensley McKie Panther coffee table, incorporating the animal motifs for which she’s known; a sloping and peaked chair by Sam Maloof, made with walnut given to him by Bennett, a Jon Brooks maple and lacquered wood ladderback chair from 1995; and a walnut and painted redwood table that Wendell Castle made in one day, while visiting Bennett’s studio.

To celebrate the 70^th anniversary of the iconic Series 7 chair, designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1955, Fritz Hansen has released a limited-edition series in colors that evoke the Danish sunrise — especially when stacked. Named 7:14 AM, the shades of green, beige, pink, violet, and blue are also a lovely palette of spring pastels. The tubular metal base is available in classic chromed steel or a glowing, iridescent “rainbow” option.

Earlier this year, France’s Mobilier National and the Cité de la Céramique – Sèvres & Limoges merged to become Manufactures Nationales, intended to provide a public hub and support for craftsmanship and the decorative arts. For the first edition of their Pavillon Program initiative, they invited Paris’s Studio GGSV to envision three “salons for the imagination” in the Pavillon d’Angiviller at the studios of the Manufacture des Gobelins in the 13th arrondissement. Studio GGSV’s immersive dreamscapes will be up through the end of the year – you can walk through the Reception Salon, a black and white space of Art Deco and baroque styles and trompe l’oeil playfulness that also highlights the beauty of turned wood. In the Conversation Lounge, a hexagonal sofa invites you to sit and socialize amid metallic reliefs on the walls that mirror the room’s bay window, while above, a disc of sky glows from the ceiling.  Boundaries – between architecture and furniture, inside and outside – are blurred again in the Reading Lounge, where the walls, floor, and ceiling are covered to create the effect of a three-dimensional painting, inspired by 19th-century romantic landscapes. These are spaces that seem to plumb unconscious depths and engage your powers of perception.

This April, RF Studio, the art and architectural firm founded by Rafael Freyre in Lima, will launch Mapa de Suelos (Soil Map), a collection of thirteen experimental stone tables inspired by Peru’s landscape. Each was handmade with the help of stone master Roberto Román, who seamlessly joined Peruvian marble, travertine, and onyx variants into designs based on aerial views and subterranean geological studies of the Andes and Amazon. It’s a labor-intensive process – each table takes months to craft. The most recent and most complicated table in the series was commissioned by Virgilio Martinez’s Central restaurant in Lima; constructed of recycled stone fragments sourced from various regions of Peru, it’s a functional work of art, but also a metaphor for the interdependence of diversity and unity, past and present. The tables will be on the RF Studio website, with three exclusively at Galerie Philia.