From the festival hub at the National Design Centre to Design Districts at Bras Basah.Bugis, Marina Bay, and Orchard, and many other Design Community locations, Singapore Design Week 2023 will present an extraordinary showcase of Singapore’s distinctive brand of creativity. Singapore design embodies a universal attitude—the desire to always seek to make lives better using design. This year’s festival theme “Better by Design” reflects the commitment of DesignSingapore Council (Dsg) to champion design and creativity that helps meet complex challenges and shape a better future. The festival runs until October 1st. Click here for a full program.
Park Nights Return @ Serpentine Galleries In London, Featuring Live Music, Performance, Dance, and Poetry
Serpentine was thrilled to announce it’s returned of Park Nights this August. Its experimental, interdisciplinary, live programme sited within the annual architectural commission, the 22nd Serpentine Pavilion designed by Lina Ghotmeh.
Bringing together multi-disciplinary artists, and featuring rave music, performance installations, poetry and dance, the exciting live programme invites audiences to engage, reflect, and connect. Park Nights runs from August to October, featuring The Living and the Dead Ensemble; Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro; Bambii and Christelle Oyiri.
Catch it’s final evening on October 8th, where Christelle Oyiri/CRYSTALLMESS will present a live iteration of her upcoming record with invited collaborators and musical guests.
The events will run through early October at Serpentine Galleries, Kensington Gardens, London.
Bottega Veneta Celebrates Brazilian Culture @ Lina Bo Bardi’s Iconic Casa de Vidro
Bottega Veneta’s cultural exchange series, The Square, was first introduced in Dubai in 2022. The Square São Paulo is the latest in Bottega Veneta’s cultural exchange series, which was preceded by a second installment in Tokyo. Under the creative direction of Matthieu Blazy, the series brings together artists, guests, and the public in immersive, site-specific events that inspire curiosity and dialogue, and champion Bottega Veneta’s values of craft, creativity, and self-expression.
Marking Bottega Veneta’s 10-year anniversary in Brazil, The Square São Paulo evolves beyond the custom square structures of Dubai and Tokyo with a curation by Mari Stockler in the lush setting of Casa de Vidro, a landmark of Brazilian modernism. Through the 11-day program, artists and artworks from across Brazil honor the legacy of Italian-born Bo Bardi, exploring her interaction with Brazilian culture and celebrating Brazilian creativity in all its forms.
"From the modernist project to her embrace of the power of Brazilian popular culture and collaboration with the counterculture, Lina challenged norms and developed ideas that crossed chronological time like arrows and are, today, an essential perspective of Brazilian identity,” says curator Mari Stockler. “With The Square São Paulo, we dive into her revolutionary thinking. The event is designed as a dialogue. We provoke time by contrasting Lina’s objects with works by modern and contemporary artists in an exchange between past, present, and possible futures.”
Born in Rome, Bo Bardi moved to Brazil in 1946, and became one of the most important and expressive figures in Brazilian modernism. With a strong emphasis on the social potential of design and architecture, her pioneering projects include the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the leisure center, SESC Pompéia. A keen writer and thinker, she co-founded the influential art magazine Habitat and also created jewelry, costume, furniture, and set designs.
Casa de Vidro was Bo Bardi’s first built project and personal residence until her death in 1992. Completed in 1951, the house has been a meeting point for artists, architects, and intellectuals both during Bo Bardi’s lifetime, and subsequently under the direction of the Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro.
Participating talents in The Square São Paulo include Arnaldo Antunes, Ibã Salles, Vivian Caccuri, Luiz Zerbini, Carlito Carvalhosa, Rosana Paulino, Alaíde Costa, Lenora de Barros, Cristiano Lenhardt, Leda Catunda, Ricardo Aleixo, and João Camarero. The event will also feature works by Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica, Augusto de Campos, Mestre Guarany, Surubim Feliciano da Paixão – as well as Bo Bardi’s own work, writings, and original furnishings housed in Casa de Vidro. Four books, based on The Square’s four pathways, are published in a limited-edition boxed set.
The event is curated around four themed pathways related to time, geometry and spirituality, Brazilian counterculture, and the roots of Bossa Nova.
“Casa de Vidro is one of my favorite places,” says Matthieu Blazy. “It’s a real inspiration to meet here with artists from across generations, across disciplines, and across Brazil to celebrate Lina Bo Bardi’s legacy and the richness of Brazilian culture. Bottega Veneta is all about timeless style. With The Square São Paulo, we recognize how Lina’s ideas and aesthetics resonate to this day, always reminding us of the transformative power of design and culture.”
The Square São Paulo opened on May 24th and will be open to the public from May 27th through June 3rd.
Herman Miller x Vitra Announce A Limited Edition Eames Fiberglass Armchair with Steinberg Cat
Vitra and Herman Miller have partnered with the Eames Office to launch a limited-edition Eames Fiberglass Chair that is hand-painted with the artwork of renowned mid-century artist and Eames friend, as well as cover artist for the New Yorker for nearly six decades, Saul Steinberg. Sanctioned by Steinberg Foundation, each chair will feature the hand-painted cat originally sketched by Steinberg in the 1950s, following the debut launch of the Eames Shell Chair in 1950, which saw the world’s first industrially mass-produced chair with the seat and backrest formed from a one-piece shell. The chair will launch on June 14th 2023 in a limited edition run of 500 chairs, 180 of which will be available in North America through Herman Miller. Click here to sign up for early access.
Opening The New Cassina Store With Creative Director Patricia Urquiola In Los Angeles
Luca Fuso and Patricia Urquiola, CEO and Art Director of Cassina respectively, together with Stephanie De Oliveira and Philippe Rousselin, Founders of Diva, presented the opening of Cassina’s incredible new store in Los Angeles. Two floors full of Cassina’s most iconic, desirable objects and new design pieces and collaborations with the likes of the late Virgil Abloh. A champion of modernism over the past almost 100 years, Cassina continue to cement its status as a leader in the field. photographs by Oliver Kupper
Bottega Veneta & Gaetano Pesce Present 'Vieni a Vedere' @ Salone del Mobile in Milan
The Humanist architect-designer-artist Gaetano Pesce is a towering figure in each of his fields; a true multidisciplinarian with an iconoclastic agenda who, despite a career spanning seven decades, still refuses to be cowed or quantified. In numerous public and private works realized globally, in the fields of architecture, town planning, interior design, industrial design and exhibition design, the constant experimentation of an artist who refuses repetition infuses all.
Following the commission given to Pesce to create a temporary site-specific artwork as show space for the Summer ’23 Bottega Veneta fashion show, the dialogue continues and a further stage is explored. Once again given creative carte blanche, and this time situated in the brand’s Montenapoleone store, Pesce creates a unique installation called ‘Vieni a Vedere’ (Come and See). Spanning the store, the immersive installation utilizes resin and fabric to create a unique experience that the visitor travels through. It frames an edition of handbags realised by Bottega Veneta for the artist according to his designs.
Embracing figuration and stories of the personal rather than the purely functional, Pesce’s bags utilize the idiosyncratic both in terms of handcraft and creativity. Based on mountains and prairies, the handbags echo his early life in Italy growing up near the mountains in Este, and the prairies of America, a reflection of where he lives today.
“This is my first design of a bag and it is figurative – two mountains with a sunrise or a sunset behind. I wanted a bag with an optimistic view. There is a capacity to realize anything at Bottega Veneta and this bag opens up a way to express future design. The design of the future has to be figurative and it has to communicate – such an object has to tell a story.” Gaetano Pesce
The installation is on view through April 22, where the artist’s edition of handcrafted handbags can also be purchased. Look out for an interview of Pesce in our forthcoming SS23 Utopia issue, also available for preorder April 22.
Sarah Ellison Studio Releases The Float Sofa At The Iconic Stahl House In Partnership With Design Within Reach
Inspired by the conversation pits of the 1970s, Australian designer Sarah Ellison’s FLOAT sofa—available in a rich Pantone brown called Piccolo or a bouclé fabric—was fêted high above Sunset Strip at the iconic Stahl House. Speaking to Ellison at the famous Case Study House #22, she remarked on how wonderful the clash was between her obsession with 70s aesthetics and mid-century mod. A low-slung multi-seater that is modularly configurable, the sofa is an instant classic. photographs by Adrian Gaut
Neo Classic Sueño: Works by Chris Wolston Shot by David Sierra
photography by David Sierra
artwork by Chris Wolston
production by Radha León
styling by Santiago Alzate
modeling by Loui, Cristian, & Cristian
Photographer David Sierra captures forms that are tropical, sexy and oneiric. Taking inspiration from the work of Medellin-based artist/designer Chris Wolston and Neoclassical postures, these images center an appreciation for the body in its natural state. Relaxed figures that are visibly comfortable within their own skin interact casually with furniture and spatial elements in a fashion that is unpretentious and uplifting.
Look out for Chris Wolston’s furniture on view now with The Future Perfect @ Design Miami and watch the accompanying film on our instagram.
Design Miami Review: Reflections on a Future Golden Age of Design
Rotganzen
Quelle Basket, Miami Edition, 2022
Vintage Basketball Hoop, Quelle Fête
Mirror object: glass mirror, foam, grout, glue
Basket hoop: metal ring with fabric netting
62 x 69 x 80 cm
Edition of 12
text by Jennifer Piejko
There isn’t much time to sit down, considering all the seating options. For the eighteenth year in a row, Design Miami has set up next to the Miami Convention Center during Art Basel Miami Beach, bringing galleries, presentations, and talks to Pride Park.
The fair’s curatorial director, Maria Cristina Didero, leads a program with the theme “The Golden Age: Looking to the Future,” which celebrates “a tomorrow of our own creation.” Looks like tomorrow can go many ways, including enthusiasm, or, if not, at least surrender to amusement: there are Gaetano Pesce and Matthieu Blazy’s lustrous dripped resin chairs for Bottega Veneta sitting in a prismatic half-circle, offering gleeful, freeform optimism (and one of them even a cheeky smile); Finnish designer Kim Simonsson’s mossy children and miniature astronauts occupying levels of an industrial metal scaffolding installation by Urban Umbrella at New York’s Jason Jacques Gallery; Amsterdam’s Rademakers gallery’s room of deflated, dripping, gluttonous disco balls by the collective Rotganzen.
Lots of designs for tomorrow incorporate historical elements into their design as well: the collection of Brazilian modernist pieces including work by Joaquim Tenreiro, Jorge Zalszupin, and José Zanine Caldas at Rio de Janeiro’s Mercado Moderno; sensual, weathered wood and stone by Natasha Dakhli and Giancarlo Valle at New York’s Magen H Gallery; warm bronze seating by Ingrid Donat, monumental Rick Owens chairs, and radiant, alien translucent cubes by Niko Koronis, shown by Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery; Maestro Dobel Tequila constructed their “Artpothecary” in the center of the fair, offering a pink crossroads of sorts in the installation The Mexican Golden Age by Mexico City-based design studio Clásicos Mexicanos, as well as their new Latinx Art Prize with El Museo del Barrio in New York, awarded for the first time next fall.
A number of booths also took this year’s theme as a prompt for starting tomorrow at the beginning—looking backward. New York’s Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts had a booth of historical works, many of them screens and dividers, including Nicola D’Ascenzo’s freestanding stained-glass wall. The geometric Art Deco florals of The Chestnut Street Window (c. 1925) was made for the Philadelphia luncheonette Horn & Hardart, the coffee and sandwich dispensary that revolutionized “fast food.” Samuel Yellin’s Gates (1912–15), ornate black wrought-iron gates from a grand private residence, rest on a nearby wall; so do 1920s and ’30s fire screens by William Hunt Diederich and Adalbert Szabo, the latter made for the transatlantic ocean liner S.S. Normandie.
The Future Perfect’s presentation at Design Miami/ 2022, Booth G09.
Photo: Joseph Kramm. Courtesy the artists and The Future Perfect.
As with so many art and design fairs, there are a fair number of mirrored works, providing lots of selfie opportunities. One of the most popular, the squiggly, tentacled gold wall mirrors shown by the Haas Brothers’ Gallery All, literally framed rose-colored glass. The simple change to the standard mirror gave passersby a chance to sneak in a little self-flattery and self-reflection, the little boost that it takes to keep moving on a long day.
Dozie Kanu's World Building Tools: An Interview From The Biodiversity Issue →
text by Oliver Kupper
portraits by Parker Woods
Dozie Kanu’s practice is a conceptual exploration of colonial and hegemonic politics, architecture, spatial narratives, and so much more. Born in Houston, Texas in 1993, and now based in Santarém, Portugal, Kanu’s investigation of cultural artifacts belies an America still grappling with not only its troubled past, but also its troubled present. Razor-sharp, anti-climb, raptor spikes, a visual and physical deterrent for vandals and undesirables, find their way onto one of his sculptures modeled as a baby crib, an emblematic nod to the countless divisions that are psychologically embedded at birth. There is something alchemical about Kanu’s reimagined objects of our urban visual landscape, like an ATM blasted with a thick layer of black epoxy sculpting clay, or a poured concrete chair in “crack rock beige” that sits on a spoked tire rim, that gives Kanu’s work a kind of authentic reclamation of power in a grief-stricken zeitgeist. We caught up with Kanu on a rare visit to Los Angeles, before the opening of his exhibition, to prop and ignore, at Manual Arts, to discuss tools for building a more socially equitable world. Read more.
A Forsaken Place: Andrea Zittel's A-Z West Is A Laboratory For The Future →
Andrea Zittel
A-Z Wagon Station customized by Giovanni Jance
2003
Powder-coated steel, MDF, aluminum, Lexan,cushions, iPod Nano, headphones, solar iPod chargers
91 x 82 x 57 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
The desert is an unforgiving, but magnetic landscape. Agnes Pelton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and many more artists have all been drawn to the desert of the American West. Its barrenness, its potential, its raw heat, its solitude, and liquid mirages all provide a contemplative and hot combination of all the right ecosystemic ingredients for artists to experiment and conceive of cosmic ideas. Even the word desert is alluring: it comes from the ecclesiastical Latin root desertum, which means a “forsaken” or “abandoned” place. Lately, though, the desert has become less a quirk of America’s multifold topography and more a frightening, but beautiful prelude to an arid, lifeless future on Earth.
Andrea Zittel fits into the historical canon of artists lured to these forsaken and abandoned landscapes—abandoned by time and most botanic nature—but she isn’t so much a land artist as she is an artist of the land. Like the late artist and sculptor Noah Purifoy before her, Zittel is not a visitor—she is a guardian of the desert’s inexplicable potential as a testing ground for future civilizations who might live in a world that is going through a rapid process of what geologists call desertification. According to scientists, over a third of the world is going through this process, and every year 120,000 square kilometers of land turns into an actual desert. Studies show that if global carbon emissions aren’t curbed, much of the Earth will become a desert by 2050. Read more. Originally published in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021
House & Garden Is A World Of Domestic Bliss @ Stroll Garden In Los Angeles
Conceived as a singular installation, House & Garden welcomes viewers into a home of domestic items rendered in clay by Analuisa Corrigan and a garden of working ceramic fountains by Lily Clark, complimented by live plant vignettes created by Alice Lam of A.L. BASA. In recontextualizing the familiar, the artists invite a moment of pause to reengage our senses and reconsider our relationship to often overlooked elements of the everyday, both domestic and elemental. Corrigan creates organic, figurative forms that unite material exploration and personal expression. Corrigan’s pieces are deceptively labor intensive, taking up to a month to make. After sketching and prototyping, each is carefully built up through a coil technique, then dried and sanded to achieve the desired silhouette. The resulting work feels simultaneously robust and delicate.
Whereas Corrigan works intuitively, Clark’s process embraces precision, reflecting her interest in engineering. After drafting a design, she rolls slabs of clay and cuts using a template, then carefully joins the seams. The surface is left unglazed to contrast with the water’s luster. For her large-scale fountains, Clark incorporates stones that she spent six months sourcing from the Whitewater quarry just outside of Palm Springs, fine tuning the design to achieve her desired water flow and sound. Clark’s fountains are arranged within an “indoor garden” by Alice Lam, whose Los Angeles-based creative studio A.L. BASA specializes in sculptural floral installations. Lam’s site-specific design references Buddhist Zen gardens created around works by Isamu Noguchi, as well as plants that are representative of California’s biodiversity. Immersive and temporal, House & Garden contemplates notions of interior and exterior — both somatic and psychological, experienced and subjective.
House & Garden is on view through June 11 @ Stroll Garden 7380 Beverly Boulevard.
Sustainability As Emotion: Niko June By Axel Swan
Odorico with Niko June ceramic stool
photography by Axel Swan
art direction by Niko June
casting by Simone Drost
“Good objects are such that they give power to an attitude, which treats sustainability not as a science, but as emotion.”
In the fall of 2021, photographer Axel Swan traveled to Copenhagen to shoot portraits of some of its unique inhabitants in collaboration with Niko June, an emerging sustainable brand that emphasizes craftsmanship, DIY, and the spirit of inclusivity. The series takes aim at the deep intimacy of its subjects and their everyday lives across the city and its boroughs.
Elinor with Niko June Eros Torso Vase
Niko June Studio Vase & Emilie seated on Niko June P-L 01 Chair
Maria with Niko June P-L 02 Stool and P-L 01 Chair
Noa with Niko P-L 02 Stool & Eros Torso Vase
Rasmus with Niko June Studio Candleholder
Johannes with Niko June Eros Torso Vase
Read A Conversation Between Ferrari Sheppard & Michèle Lamy On The Occasion Of His Solo Exhibition @ UTA Artist Space →
Ferrari Sheppard is an enigmatic, multi-disciplinary artist whose practice defies classification, and lives firmly at the center of a three-dimensional venn diagram. Likewise, the work of Michèle Lamy is as fluid and instinctive as it is crystallized in her unmistakable and ever-expansive character. She is not just a maven of fashion, design, and art, or an innovator of music and former restaurateur. She is a cultivator of community and expression. Sheppard is not just a painter, writer, photographer and music producer. He is an activist who has worked to provide relief aid in Haiti, shape economic policy and development in South Africa, and shine light on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It makes perfect sense that the two of them would fortuitously meet at Mr. Chow’s while stepping outside for a cigarette. Sheppard’s recent solo exhibition of paintings, Positions of Power, at UTA Artist Space is a testament to the mistreatment of a generation for profit by the criminal justice system. They are love letters to those who carried the weight of the “war on drugs” and risked it all in pursuit of freedom in the United States. Their structural composition is the result of an almost unconscious, improvised dance. A process that the artist refers to as “walking while painting.” The figures are laid heavy with dark brown and black pigments that visibly absorb light, and are gilded with a reflective gold trim, creating a balance that feels harmonious and befitting. At the center of the gallery’s main space lies a brutalist, three-pronged elmwood bench of mythical giant proportions. A place to put everything down and spend some time with the work. A creation that could only come from the collective minds of Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens. And the perfect place for these two chameleonic masters of material, sound, and ceremony to discuss their work. Read more.
[AUTRE ARCHIVE] Read Oliver Kupper's Essay On Los Angeles' Iconic Westin Bonaventure From Our Winter 2018 Issue →
Westin Bonaventure, exterior, elevated view to northwest, May 1989
Michael Portman, The Westin Bonaventure Collection
Click here to read.
West Of Modernism: California Graphic Design 1975-1995 @ LACMA
The late 20th century was a transformational period for graphic design. Questioning the increasingly rigid rules of modernism, designers pressed for greater autonomy in their work. At the same time, dizzying advances in technology upended existing design and production processes. Far from the established New York design world, California became a haven for avant-garde designers, a hub of innovation in both discourse and practice.
This installation explores how the intense ideological debates and technological changes were manifest in posters and publications. It features the work of many influential designers including Emigre, Inc., Ed Fella, April Greiman, Rebeca Méndez, Deborah Sussman, and Lorraine Wild. West Of Modernism: California Graphic Design 1975-1995 is on view through April 21, 2019 at LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Fourth Annual MAK Games @ The John Lautner Designed Sheats-Goldstein Residence In Los Angeles
The MAK Games features semi-finals and final tennis tournament matches, followed by a Pro-Am match, followed by a dance party in the incomparable “Club James” hidden below the infinity tennis court. The players come from the worlds of art, design, architecture, and entertainment. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Highlights From Design Miami In Miami Beach
photographs by Ava Berlin
A Tour Of The Ross House Designed in 1938 By Raphael Soriano Presented by The MAK Center in Los Angeles
photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
A Tour Of The Daniel House Designed by Gregory Ain Presented By The MAK Center in Los Angeles
photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper