05.07.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Modernist Villa Outside Milan Provided the Backdrop for This Stellar Showcase of Emerging Design

This year in Milan, Alcova's founders chose to host half of its exhibition in one of our all-time favorite buildings: Villa Borsani, the 1945 residence designed by Osvaldo Borsani, architect and co-founder of furniture brand Tecno, in Varedo, north of the city. Although much of Borsani’s incredible original furniture was tucked away for the occasion (a reason to go back and revisit), several designers presented impressive new works against the villa’s striking patterned marble floors, custom textiles, and that staircase. Here are a few of our favorite things we spotted there, which, coincidentally, also provides a tour of sorts around this iconic building.

05.02.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Entryway at the Kips Bay Show House Takes Wall-to-Wall Carpeting to New Heights

As a participant in this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House, New York–based designer Bennett Leifer wanted to do something that would push design boundaries, he says: “not necessarily in a way that would be loud or provocative but that would be intellectually exciting.” Soon after learning he’d be part of this year’s iteration, Leifer happened to have dinner with the team from Edward Fields Carpet Maker (who you'll remember we worked with on our Norway x New York exhibition!). He’s worked closely with the custom luxury rug brand for years and has long admired “their heritage and their vision” – the company’s storied work has been featured in many iconic settings, including Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs and the famous sunken living room of the Miller House by architect Eero Saarinen and interior designer Alexander Girard. That conversation provided the creative spark for Reframed Foyer, Leifer’s contribution to the Show House.

05.01.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

How Should We Live Now? In Milan, RISD’s Objects May Shift Exhibition Offered a Woozy Vision for Our Domestic Future

As a general rule, Milan thrives on spectacle. Some of the most memorable Salone exhibitions in recent years have relied on elaborate scenography, from Established & Sons in 2010 — when the British furniture brand filled a former Jai Alai court with walled "rooms" made from stacks of untreated tulipwood — to 2018, when Hermès constructed, over the course of three weeks inside a Milanese museum, seven towering pavilions made from thousands of jewel-toned zellige tiles. (Ask me what was inside those pavilions? Zero recollection.) So how is a student-run exhibition, from a newly founded design course exhibiting in Milan for the first time, supposed to compete? That was the conundrum facing 20 Rhode Island School of Design students, who debuted the conceptually-driven show Objects May Shift at Salone Satellite in Milan last month.

04.30.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

F Taylor Colantonio’s Solo Show in Venice Makes You Feel Like You’re in an Underwater Grotto

To enter F Taylor Colantonio’s show Frutti di Mare (literally, fruit of the sea) is to be submerged in an otherworldly environment, a kind of aquatic grotto where things are fluid and surreal. Glowing forms that have a rippling effect, as if underwater; vessels that feel like remnants of an ancient civilization or like they landed here long ago from outer space. It’s Colantonio’s solo debut with the roving gallery Object & Thing, in partnership with D.H. Office.

04.24.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

These 5 Installations in Milan Turned Materials Into the Main Event

I spent a lot of last week in Milan thinking about innovation in materials; in presentation after presentation, some of the best work to emerge from the fair came from materials companies who had hired A-plus designers to translate their raw product into something almost implausibly beautiful. From recycled aluminum to post-industrial plastic to a company that's asking us to reconsider the humble linoleum tile, here are five of our favorite materials-based projects from the week.

04.23.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

An All-Female Welding Team Built Studio Kuhlmann’s Gorgeous, Stainless Steel Ode to Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dreams, the new solo show from German designer and welder Hannah Kuhlmann, is an ode to unconscious depths, afternoon naps, and theta state reverie. On view at St Vincents gallery in Antwerp through mid-May, these pieces evoke an atmosphere somewhere between illusion and reality, following a kind of dream logic where the unexpected is encountered and absorbed. Lucid dreaming, after all, is when you realize you’re dreaming in your dream. “I wanted to capture the essence of those moments of heightened awareness within our subconscious,” Kuhlmann says. “The title Lucid Dreams speaks to the surreal experience of being both asleep and awake, where the mind wanders freely and perceptions shift.”

04.19.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

If You Like Architectural Details, You’ll Love This Comprehensive Archive of Modernist Buildings and Interiors, On View in Milan

Unless you’re very offline, design-wise, you probably know about Prague-based architecture historian and curator — as well as frequent Sight Unseen contributor! — Adam Štěch. On his well-loved Instagram account, @okolo_architecture, he’s been assiduously and beautifully cataloging 20th-century architecture and interior design details for years. His photographic efforts aren’t simply representative, they’re revelatory, and they’re currently on view as part of Salone in his Elements exhibition at Dropcity, a new center for architecture and design in Milan. By focusing on the parts — the lighting, seating, tables, railings, doors, handles, windows, floors, and more — Štěch’s 3,000 images give us a new sense of the whole: not only the larger project of how a particular building was put together in a cohesive way, but a comprehensive view of how architecture and design developed and moved throughout the last century, charting the differences and similarities of Modernist buildings over time and through place.

04.09.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

Caroline Walls’s New Exhibition — Named for a Joy Division Song — Explores the Artist’s Ideas About Intimacy and Ambiguity

Mystery and accessibility, our public and private identities, what we can only glimpse of other people and what we may not even know about ourselves — these are the puzzles at the heart of Caroline Walls’ first solo show, Touching from a Distance, at the James Makin Gallery in Melbourne. “I’m interested in how much we reveal of ourselves to the outside world, and how this can create or diminish connection and intimacy between ourselves and others,” says the New Zealand–born, Melbourne-based Walls, whose large oil paintings of striped, billowing fabric both contrast with and complement her more figurative works of the female form. Taken together, her oil paintings inhabit a space somewhere between abstraction and representation, exposing different regions of the same thematic territory: emotional intimacy.

03.20.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Show — and a New Location — for Superhouse is Allowing Stephen Markos to Think Big

It's fitting that Paa Joe’s Celestial City is the inaugural show in Superhouse's expanded space. Not only because the Ghanaian sculptor’s work spans art and design, but because it speaks to a certain aesthetic conversation between the present and the past that Superhouse has been participating in — a contemporary revival of an early '80s aesthetic, kind of Postmodern, occasionally mixed with Warholian commercial iconography. It sparks thoughts on how we interact with brands and the commodification of just about everything, but it’s also… fun.

03.05.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Exhibition Featuring Florals in Every Form — And Our New Favorite Table

India Mahdavi's Project Room is where the Iranian-born interior designer puts on freeform exhibitions four times a year, and it occupies just a single storefront below Mahdavi's studio in Paris's 7th arrondissement. Yet the space, now on its 12th curatorial outing, tends to occupy an outsized, Zeitgeist-driven share of the collective design consciousness due to the quality of its exhibitions: so far, one themed "reds and tartans" (both on the upswing, trendwise), one curated by AGO Projects (Mexico City–based gallery, pretty much universally loved), and the most recent, "Foreign Flowers," which is being presented as part of the programming for Matter and Shape, a new, compact fair in the Jardin des Tuileries, designed by Willo Perron. Foreign Flowers is curated by Matter and Shape's artistic director Dan Thawley, and it investigates the unexpected dovetailing of flowers and plants with the disciplines of furniture-making, fine art, craft, and collectible design.

03.04.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

At Zona Maco, Agnes’s First Solo Exhibition is Bestrewn With Symbols of Luck

When the Guatemala City-based duo Agnes first burst onto the scene in 2017, they did so in a decidedly iconic fashion: Their debut collection was immediately embraced by the international design community, with splashy press clips, interesting placements, and influential commissions (AGO Projects founders Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg asked the two to create a rug for their own CDMX home, which was later featured in our book, How to Live With Objects). Now AGO is spotlighting Agnes’s sophomore collection at their Mexico City–based gallery as part of the designers’ first solo exhibition, which opened during last month’s Zona Maco festivities.

02.29.24

Excerpt: Exhibition

This Melbourne Exhibition Signals a Return to Romanticism in Design

We've been dancing around naming it for a while — or we've been calling it other, less expansive, more niche things — but it's official: Romanticism is creeping back into design. Following a similar moment in fashion — which saw things like Alessandro Michele’s peacock-y looks for Gucci or, really, anything from Harris Reed’s eponymous line — we’ve slowly clocked the appearance of flowing skirts around simple stools and lamps, intricately patterned floral wallpapers, deep oxblood-colored furniture pieces, and dramatic gestures like tapestries hung on apartment walls — all hinting at design’s turn to embrace its romantic side. A counter to the simplified geometries and washed-out hues of the Millennial aesthetic? A reflection of society’s current highly emotive state? Whatever the reason for this shift, the recent work of trans-Pacific duo BMDO marks a significant step in that direction, and their self-professed “playful, dark, social, and emotional” work is currently on view through this weekend at Oigall Projects gallery in Melbourne.