Miami Artist Francesco Locastro

Despite the ubiquity of — and our affection for — Instagram and the internet, the way we discovered Italian-born, Miami-based artist Francesco Locastro this summer remains one of our favorite ways to source new talent: wandering aimlessly through the aisles of an art or design fair until something stops you in your tracks with its sheer beauty.
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Fredrik Paulsen chairs

A Furniture Collection Inspired By Pick-Up Sticks

We gave you a sneak peek of Fredrik Paulsen’s solo exhibition at Paris’s Galerie Torri earlier this summer, but when we saw the Stockholm-based designer had properly photographed the whole collection, we wanted to share the results. Called Mikado — a name we assume originates from the European form of pick-up sticks — the chairs are made from simple pieces of pine that Paulsen stains a brilliant teal blue.
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Justine Ashbee of Native Line

Justine Ashbee is one of those talents we've been circling around for years — first coveting a fine, copper-threaded special-edition light she did with Iacoli & McAllister, then ogling her beautiful wall hangings in stories like our own home tour with Totokaelo's Jill Wenger and outlets like Maryam Nassir Zadeh. But we've never had a proper introduction to the onetime Seattle-based artist — now living in Brighton, England — until today.
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Mexico City Artist Pia Camil

A 2014 exhibition from Mexico City–based artist Pia Camil, featuring hand-dyed and stitched textile panels complemented by paintings and geometric, low-fired ceramic sculptures.
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Art Prints by RoAndCo on Bezar

New York creative firm RoAndCo have used a Memphis- and trompe l'oeil–inspired motif as a jumping off point for a brand new series of art prints for sale exclusively on Bezar. The pastel-colored prints, which come in the 11 different designs pictured below and range from $29 to $129, depending on size, are only available for purchase for the next five days.
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80s art Tumblr

A Tumblr Devoted to 80s Art

Here's the thing about the '80s: Some of us actually grew up in them. And for us, seeing a Tumblr full of art from that decade doesn't so much trigger an Internet-age wet dream as a blast of straight-up nostalgia — for the kinds of things we remember hanging in our rich friends' parents living rooms, or on the walls of our orthodontist, or in fancy department-store furniture displays.
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Node Lights by Amsterdam’s Odd Matter

The young Amsterdam-based duo Odd Matter, who we mentioned today in a separate post dedicated to their new work at Aram Gallery, have been busy bees lately. In addition to that project, the Dutch and Bulgarian designers recently launched a series called Node, which includes four highly expressive, sculptural lamps in copper and Jesmonite with forms designed to underscore their functions.
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Michael Wilkinson’s Decay-Inspired Landscape Series

Much of the collage-based work of Glasgow artist Michael Wilkinson, according to his New York gallery Tanya Bonakdar, "examines notions of power and resistance through an intricate web of political, cultural, and personal references" — among them the "histories of art and political radicalism, Marxist theory, popular music, and punk subculture of the 1970s and 1980s" — incorporating things like survival gear and vintage photographs. Yet his new gridded Landscape pieces, which we spotted in Bonakdar's booth at Frieze New York in May, take a more subtle (and visually beautiful) approach.
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L.A.’s Newest Design Brand, TOOOLS

Back in 2012, we wrote about the launch of a gallery called Beginnings in Brooklyn, which, a year later, met an untimely and unfortunate end. But two of the gallery's founders have since gone on to forge a new (ahem) beginning, this time giving it a far less superstitious name: TOOOLS, a Los Angeles–based object-design company recently started by artist Caroline Hwang and designer Joel Speaskmaker that aims to be "a new company with an old ethos: form & function." See what the duo have to say about the project, and see tons of images, after the jump.
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Subtle, Pastel Paintings Inspired by the Tokyo Metro

Growing up in Wisconsin, artist Trek Matthews was initially inspired by his natural surroundings, incorporating wildlife scenes and Native American mythologies into his illustrations. But following a move to Atlanta and a short stint in Japan in 2014, his artistic style began maturing into what we see today.
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Designers Interpret the Classic Tolix A Chair

We aren't quite sure how we missed this project — considering both our affinity for the classic Tolix A chair (we might own seven (!) of them ourselves) and our affection for the designers involved — but in Milan last month, the French company celebrated its 80th anniversary and in doing so invited eight design studios to reinterpret its most famous offering.
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Wintercheck Factory’s Collection No. 300

When we asked Brooklyn's Wintercheck Factory — who debuted their latest collection with us at Sight Unseen OFFSITE last month — to shoot those new pieces in the most appropriate scenario they could imagine for our Self Portrait column, their choice of venues ended up being even more fitting than they themselves realized. A 1910 bank building in Bed-Stuy is about to become the duo's new studio, and clearly it makes for a stunning backdrop, but having been ripped up, painted, retiled, left to rot, bricked up, and, now, appropriated as a creative space, it can also be read as a symbol of Wintercheck Factory's own gradual reinvention.
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