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.

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04.06.24

Saturday Selects

Week of April 1, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a new exhibition space in Buenos Aires, a soft/hard collision in the USM x Comme Si pop-up, and the chicest utility knife we've ever seen. 

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04.05.24

Sight Unseen Collection

In a Major Spring Update, Our Shoppable Collection Has New Outdoor Furniture, Classic Wood Dining Tables, Pendant Lights, and More

When we first started Sight Unseen, as two journalists excited to run our own magazine, we never dreamed we'd one day be able to say, "We sell designer fire tools" 😂 — and yet here we are, nearly 15 years later, with a shoppable furniture collection that encompasses those fire tools, plus bar carts, chic upholstered sofas, sculptural dining chairs, and more, all by some of the best talents we've featured in recent years. Today marks the launch of a huge spring update to the Sight Unseen Collection, which is our biggest expansion yet.

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04.04.24

From the Archives

Gaetano Pesce Influenced the Current Generation of Designers More Than Anyone We Know

Earlier this week, I had the occasion to look back at an article we'd published in 2016, where I referred to Donald Judd as the patron saint of Sight Unseen. I was puzzled, even as I reread my own words: "As our tastes and interests have shifted over the years, we could often point to different historical figures — Ettore Sottsass during our heavy Memphis phase; Bruno Munari during our Shape Shop days." I suppose I felt uneasy in my nearly decade-old declaration because in my mind, as we've watched the design landscape mutate and come together over the past few years, there's been one designer who has remained at the top, inspiring more of the current crop of young designers than anyone else we know: Gaetano Pesce, who the world lost today at the age of 84.

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05.22.21

Saturday Selects

Week of May 17, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a Swedish furniture brand focused on sustainability, a show that explores the healing powers of color, and the coolest swing set you've ever seen.

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04.01.24

Up and Coming

This French Designer is Bringing the Collectible Design Gallery Model to India

“Everyone has their eyes on India,” says French designer Florence Louisy, who ended up in the country herself quite serendipitously but has since carved a path. As co-founder and creative director of the Mumbai gallery Aequo (Æquō) — self-described as “India’s first collectible design gallery” — Louisy encourages international designers to discover and adapt traditional craft techniques from across the country, and to collaborate with artisans to create collections of beautiful contemporary furniture. Thanks to a booming economy, the demand for the gallery’s pieces, which include many of Louisy’s own, has soared. 

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03.30.24

Saturday Selects

Week of March 25, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a sizeable exhibition of furniture and art in Rome by the now-solo Ronan Bouroullec, (yet another) newcomer South Korean furniture studio we've got our eye on, and three interiors in France and New York with a warm, vintage-heavy appeal, including the eclectic project above by Corpus Studio.

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03.29.24

Fair Report

10 Projects We Loved at the 2024 Collectible Fair in Brussels

The biggest news to come out of this month's Collectible fair, now in its seventh year, wasn't about a ground-breaking gallery or a new designer at all but rather the fact that the Brussels-based fair — much beloved in the design community for its rigorous curation and its commitment to highlighting emerging designers in the collectible field — will be debuting a show in New York this fall. From September 4-10, the inaugural US edition will take place inside the enigmatic WSA building in New York's financial district; it follows this year's successful westward expansion of Alcova into Miami. What can we say, we Americans love to shop! If you're the collecting kind, consider our round-up of the most interesting projects to come out of this year's Collectible fair in Brussels a preview of what's to come.

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03.28.24

Q+A

Architectural and Archetypal, Kalon Pieces Are Defined By Their Thoughtful Details   

Since 2007, Michaele Simmering and Johannes Pauwen have been producing work that is as poetic as it is practical through their Los Angeles studio, Kalon. The studio borrows its name from an Ancient Greek concept of ideal beauty that comprises both physical and moral aspects. It’s a high bar to set. In their practice, Simmering and Pauwen take a principled approach that seriously considers the environmental and social impact of what they do; “sustainability” has become an overused word, but for Kalon, it’s a true ethos, guiding not only their production process — in terms of the materials and labor involved ­— but also how their designs exist in the world. To celebrate Kalon joining the Sight Unseen Collection, we checked in to get a sense of what’s changed — and what hasn’t — since we last touched base.

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03.26.24

Sighted

In Julie Richoz’s New Mirrors for Vitra, Color Theory and the Tiniest Details Work to Change the Way We See

When Julie Richoz, a Swiss-French designer in Paris, was envisioning her new Colour Frame Mirror for Vitra, she was drawn to elemental forms, inspired in part by wooden building blocks and toys, those staples of childhood. “I like the innocent gestures they refer to — the simple pleasure of playing with colors and shape,” she says. But even as her mirror references those basic objects, it also moves beyond them. There’s a fun lightness here, but there's also a high degree of sophistication, precision, and intent.

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03.23.24

Saturday Selects

Week of March 18, 2024

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: highlights from the inaugural Matter and Shape show in Paris, two exhibitions of cheerful winter-busting paintings in New York, a colorful new look for De Sede (above), and a double-sided terrycloth shower curtain that would enliven even the dullest bathroom.

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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.

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