02.14.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

A Master of Perceptual Motion, Inspired by Mondrian

In his bold-colored and paneled paintings, textured by a variety of brushstrokes, Los Angeles artist Scot Heywood finds ways to generate perceptual movement and subtle energy. His exhibition of recent paintings, called “Scot Heywood: Shift ǀ Stack ǀ Sunyata,” are on view through the end of February at Peter Blake Gallery in Laguna Beach, conjuring parallels to the geometric styles of Piet Mondrian.

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02.11.17

Saturday Selects

Week of February 6, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Some of our favorite interiors in recent memory, featuring Japanese-inspired minimalism, rattan-covered walls, abstract art, '70s-style couches, and a trompe l'oeil staircase to nowhere.

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01.31.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Abstract Geometric Paintings That Fold, Like Origami, Into Three Dimensions

On view at The Hole now, "Fourteen Paintings" is the first New York solo show for Louisiana-born, Los Angeles–based artist Robert Moreland, who in fact creates work that exists more in the space between painting and sculpture — three-dimensional canvases made from drop-cloths, tacks, leather hinges, and acrylic paint, that are hardly paintings at all but rather painted objects that explore how line and color can be disrupted by volume.

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01.13.17

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sunset-Inspired Color Fades Meet Slabs of Marble In This Stunning Paris Exhibition

The Belgian painter Pieter Vermeersch has been known to fill rooms with soft, colorful gradients that define architectural space in beautifully strange ways, bordering on optical illusion. Both those works and his new canvases, on view now at Galerie Perrotin, dovetail with Vermeersch's professional origins in photography in the way they deal with light and perspective — but the new works physically ground all that ethereal color with panels of heavy marble.

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01.09.17

Studio Visit

At 83, Vasa — and His Famed Acrylic Sculptures — Are Still On Top of the LA Art World

When our friend and sometime contributor Robin Stein emailed us to reveal that Los Angeles artist — and longtime SU obsession — Vasa Mihich was an old family friend, and ask if we might be interested in shooting his Los Angeles studio and archives, we jumped at the chance. What Stein's photos reveal is something that we, who often focus on design's newest and youngest practitioners, rarely have access to: a portrait of an octogenarian artist, still producing at a rapid clip, at the height of his career and his potential; a maker clearly in love with both his materials and his process.

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09.16.16

Excerpt: Book

Inside Jonas Wood’s Perspective-Bending Interior World

The LA artist Jonas Wood currently has a new exhibition on view at Anton Kern Gallery; called Portraits, it depicts various loved ones — his family on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah; his wife, Shio Kusaka, with an unruly-haired dog — in Wood's signature colorful, mise-en-abyme–happy style. (We like to think of it as Henri Rousseau, if Rousseau lived in 2016 Culver City). But our favorite Wood era remains Interiors, the 2012 catalogue that's being re-issued this week and that we're excerpting on the site today.

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09.07.16

Graphic Design

A Tech-Office Mural is the Ultimate Canvas for These Graphic Designers

By now, the large-scale mural has become something of a familiar, de rigueur decoration for tech HQs — the past few years have seen everything from Trek Matthews for Dolby Labs, to Serena Mitnik-Miller for Facebook, Ian Ross for Lyft, Camille Walala (also for Facebook) and more. But this latest might be our favorite yet: Commissioned for Dropbox's 26,000-square-foot Flatiron office in New York, the mural we're featuring today is a collaboration between New York graphic designers and former Kickstarter co-workers Aaron Robbs and Alex Proba of Studio Proba.

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08.29.16

Sighted

These Tiny, Affordable Nudes Put a Contemporary Spin on a Classical Genre

As NG Collective Studio, sisters Laura Naples and Kristen Giorgi sell their collaborative artworks on Uprise Art, an online gallery representing up and coming talents. That's where we spotted these gestural watercolor Mini Nudes. "I played around with the concept of how, using color and shape, the nude figures could relate to modern elements that we currently see in design and fashion," Giorgi says.

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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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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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04.05.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

A New Series of Pastel Paintings, Inspired by Floridian Hues

In her colorful, line-driven work, Brooklyn artist Jesse Moretti has always explored the space between flatness and dimensionality, and the visual tricks one might use to create a bridge between the two. Her newest body of work, called FOAME — on view through Sunday at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York — does so quite literally: In many of her paintings, Moretti employs a shadowy line that creates the illusion of a canyon carved into the wood — or, perhaps, like an X-acto knife cut into foam.

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04.01.16

Studio Visit

For Brooklyn Artist Landon Metz, Painting Takes on a New Dimension

Surprising elements — from a Duchamp readymade and postmodern tables to avant-garde music and architecture — are the seedlings with which 30-year-old Landon Metz sows his artistic philosophy. For Metz, whose studio resides in Bushwick, these are all materials that belong to the same creative ecosystem. They also provide fertile ground for his spare, lighter-than-air paintings, which tend toward the biomorphic and richly hued repeating patterns. His latest exhibition, open now through April 9th at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, centers around Metz’s affinity for the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis, one of the movement’s central figures.

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