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06.29.17

Up and Coming

Six Talents to Watch from RCA’s 2017 Graduate Show

Despite continued uncertainty about the effect Brexit might have on applications from students abroad, this year’s Royal College of Art graduate show was a celebration of global design talent, showcasing some of the best emerging talents from the EU and beyond. Here are six of our favorites.
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De Allegri and Fogale
04.12.17

Sighted

A Mystical Marble Interior in the Heart of Milan

The last time we saw a site-specific installation by London-based duo De Allegri and Fogale, you literally couldn't miss it — their tinted acrylic tunnel stretched across a bridge at the V&A, smack in the middle of the London Design Festival. But last week, the duo launched a project in Milan so small and so hidden that you had to know exactly what you were looking for in order to find it. But perhaps that was the point: Called Mystical Solace, the installation was meant as a commentary on the quiet, contemplative spaces that have become so popular during events like these.
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Faye Toogood Friedman Benda
03.01.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

At Friedman Benda, Faye Toogood Channels Her Spiritual and Earthly Instincts

Since showing her first ​Assemblage​ furniture collection back in 2010, British designer Faye Toogood has evolved the series, adding pieces in new materials to each subsequent collection — from sycamore and stone, to resin and steel, to patinated brass and wire mesh, to fiberglass and plaster. Her latest range, ​Assemblage 5​, on show at Friedman Benda in New York in the designer's first solo U.S. exhibition, is inspired by spiritual objects but bound by her signature balance of elemental materials, invoking a strong sense of ritual and permanence.
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02.17.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Matt Paweski Chose Art Over Design — But We Forgive Him

Years ago, when we first profiled Matt Paweski, we got really excited about his colorful furniture, but alas, it was not to be: Paweski's roots have always been in art, and art is what's occupied his portfolio pretty much ever since. His newest body of work, which went on view today at Herald St. gallery in London, features sculptures any designer could appreciate.
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02.02.17

Up and Coming

Look Inside the Practice of Four Up-And-Coming Ceramicists

What we found at RCA's annual Work in Progress exhibition, in the Ceramics & Glass program, was a study in experimentation: clay that had been manipulated into terrazzo-like slabs, perforated bricks, stringy lumps, punched-in blobs, donut-like lamps, and meticulous geometrics, and almost nothing that looked like it had been turned on a traditional potter's wheel.
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09.23.16

Fair Report

The Best of 2016’s London Design Festival

Because many of London's top designers create work throughout the year for international galleries or the Milan Furniture Fair, the LDF, in its best years, feels less about splashy furniture debuts and more about experimentation and collaboration. The stakes are lower, the opportunity for delight is higher. Here are some of the best things we found this year.
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RCA emerging designers 2016
06.28.16

Up and Coming

Six Talents to Watch from RCA’s 2016 Graduate Show

Martino Gamper, Tomás Alonso, Raw-Edges, Soft Baroque — these are just a few of the designers who came from abroad to study at London's Royal College of Art and ended up making a home in the UK. So it's no wonder a dampened mood filled the air at this year's graduate showcase, in the wake of the EU Referendum, with an underlying anxiety of how the political sphere might affect the influx — and future prospects — of applying students. Still, the show was as fruitful as ever at uncovering this year's next big thing designers — click through for six of our favorites!
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Zuza Mengham resin sculptures
06.14.16

Up and Coming

One-Of-a-Kind Resin Sculptures, Whose Fates Are Sealed in an Flash

Most artists and designers start their practices small, then scale up their work as their ambitions, finances, and studio spaces grow. London-based Zuza Mengham has done the opposite: Back in art school, she welded semi-functional steel sculptures so large and unwieldy she sometimes had to destroy them afterwards, while recently she began turning her attention towards resin experiments compact enough to perch on a bookshelf. Both endeavors come from a similar interest in working within the transitional states of materials.
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05.25.16

Up and Coming

Meet the Talented Sisters Behind Our New Favorite Lighting Brand

If you visited Sight Unseen OFFSITE last week, you might have noticed one standout booth in particular, dressed as it was in moody shades of blue, showcasing an incredible number of variations on the sculptural, globe-bulbed typology that's recently become so en vogue in the lighting world. In fact, in its striking beauty, the booth was impossible to miss: The lights were the work of London-based sisters Gwendolyn and Guillane Kerschbaumer, two Austrian-born designers who work under the studio name Areti.
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Ben Branagan's sculptural vases
02.26.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sculptural Vases With Scholarly Origins

Among our 30-something friends, collaging is suddenly all the rage. (Maybe it's the new adult coloring book?) But to our minds, there's another use for old books and papers that consistently produces a far more beautiful result: paper pulp, the key ingredient in CHIAOZZA's charming Lump Nubbins, Silo Studio's PPPPP bowls, and now Ben Branagan's Monuments series, which debuted last night in a window installation at London's Darkroom concept shop. For the exhibition, Branagan, a designer and professor in visual communications, transformed the pulped remains deaccessioned library books into a series of totemic, distinctly non-functional pots and vases.
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