pretty obsessed with this collaboration between Crayola and ASOS. So smart and looks fucking rad.
Japanese designer Norihiko Terayama suspends simple floral arrangements in polygonal forms, contrasting the organic material with straight, meticulous lines. With the simple addition of pins and thread his series Crust of the Polygon reframes the dried plants as poetic sculptures. Another one of his series, Polygon of Tree Branch, features full branches encased in a similar geometric style.
Terayama studied at Design Academy Eindhoven where he trained under designer Richard Hutten and was immersed in Dutch conceptual design. His company Studio Note designs home and lifestyle products which often incorporate natural elements. You can see more projects by the Japanese designer on his website.
Famed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (previously) is known for her color explosions, light matrices, and proclivity towards covering many of her works in a dazzling layer of dots. In one of her most interactive installations, the artist hands her interest in dot making over to the visitor. The Obliteration Room invites guests to “obliterate” a domestic interior by placing colorful stickers onto the walls, furniture, and floors.
For her recent commission for the inaugural National Gallery of Victoria Triennial, the artist transformed this concept to include a flower motif. For Flower Obsession (2017) guests were given artificial gerbera daisies and flower stickers to place on any surface of their choosing, completely covering the faux-apartment by the end of the triennial’s four-month run. This floral theme taps into the beginning of the artist’s art-making, referencing a memory from her early childhood.
“One day, after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth, I looked up to see that the ceiling, the windows, and the columns seemed to be plastered with the same red floral pattern,” Kusama explains in a press release for the triennial. “I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated … This was not an illusion but reality itself.”
The NGV Triennial closed late last week. You can view more documentation from the inaugural exhibition, including this massive installation of hyperrealistic human skulls by Ron Mueck, on the National Gallery of Victoria’s website.
Marcelo Monreal is a Brazilian digital collage artist based in Santa Catarina, Brazil.
Patty Carroll‘s latest photo series is simply breathtaking. By camouflaging the woman in drapery and/or domestic objects, she creates a dark and humorous game of hide-and-seek with the viewers.
Lino Lago paints realistic portraits and scenes in oil and adds a layer of abstracted intrigue using bright fields of color. His recent series, Fake Abstract, is comprised of classically-styled portraits of women, mostly obscured by solid blocks of red, pink, or blue. A thin sliver or squiggle, reminiscent of a finger dragged across a foggy window, reveals a peek at the figure beneath the color. It is up to the viewer’s imagination whether Lago paints a full portrait and covers it in color, or, uses the color as the base and adds the portrait into the blank canvas left by the squiggle.
The artist has also explored juxtapositions of traditional European interiors—dining rooms, parlors, and museum galleries—with unexplained splashes of bright color that appear to explode into the rooms from doorways and windows.
Lago, who is Spanish and resides in Spain and Lithuania, exhibits widely and has upcoming shows at Bredgade Kunsthandel in Copenhagen (April 12), Geraldine Banier in Paris (June 7th), Moret Art in Coruña, Spain (end of June), and Goodwin Fine Art in Denver (November). You can see more of Lago’s artwork on his website.
Prop stylist and designer Kristen Meyer melds quotidian materials into distinctive outlines in her series of geometric flat lays. The designer, who is based in New Haven, Connecticut, gathers crackers, sticks, spaghetti, herbs, and other common raw materials and arranges them in circles and squares. The finesse comes in her use of negative space, creating implied borders lines that help complete the shape without a full density of “ingredients.” You can see more of Meyer’s work on Instagram. She also offers prints of her images on her website.
Elzo Durt Creates Underground Culture Through His Psychedelic Art
Elzo Durt was born in Brussels in 1980. Following an adolescence drenched in skateboarding and punk culture, he graduated in 2003 with a degree in graphic design from the Ecole de Recherche Graphique (GraphicResearchSchool) in Brussels – and began to flood Belgium with his psychedelic and punkoïd images. In 2004 he opened his art gallery – Plin Tub ‘- in Brussels, as well as his own publishing house – two opportunities to exhibit his artworks and those of his favorite artists. At the same time he became responsible for graphic communication at Recyclart, the mecca to the Brussels underground culture. Up until 2006 he was also the artistic director of Voxer magazine.
Over the years he established his reputation for designing posters and album covers for many different bands and labels – Thee Oh Sees, Frustration, La Femme, Le Prince Harry, Magnetix, Jack of Heart, to name a few . He also designed visuals for skate- and snowboards brands such as Carhartt, Rome and Flip, and for clothing brands like Lacoste and Step Art.
Drones with lights captured in long exposure photographs by Reuben Wu
On Formentera, the southernmost Balearic island, Marià Castelló has designed a family home that draws on oppositions: telluric and tectonic, heavy and light, land and ocean.
The home has been built into the rocky landscape of the island: the land carved as if it were a sculpture, with materials from the excavation then used in the construction of the home. In construction, preference was given to local and natural materials: crushed gravel, Capri limestone, pine and fir wood, and recycled cotton panels. Determined to conserve the environment through both the form and function of the home, large rainwater tanks gather water for the property and when a cave was discovered during construction the design was reconfigured to accommodate it. The strata of the landscape is also evident on the lower floors, where the walls are made from roughly hewn stone that was cut away to allow the house cool spaces below the ground. This subterranean level links the three above-ground volumes; between which there are patios, connecting walkways, and a courtyard which features the surprise-cave. Upstairs, the living areas are airy and bright, with windows that offer sweeping views of the Balearic Sea beyond.
Remember when HomePod came out and we were all like “way to be late to the party Apple, Google and Amazon already have those” and Apple was all like “right, but here’s a spot by Spike Jonze that will make you want to throw your Alexa out the window” and we were all like “ohhhhh right right. ok ok. we get it now.”
Sissure (ommateum) by Kate MccGwire, 2016, Mixed media with goose down and pigeon quills, H42 x H42 x D6cm (framed)
Since 2013, artist Claudia Fontes (previously) has been investigating the use and meaning of the word “foreigner” in a series of small figurative sculptures. Each sculpture, which is about the size of Fontes’ hand (about 23 x 5 cm / 9 x 2 inches) is made with flaxseed paper porcelain. Anonymous figures, alone or in groups, are consumed by or emerging from organic textures that resemble grass, sea sponges, and thin shards of stone. Fontes has been based in England for the last ten years, where ‘foreigner’ is a popular pejorative term. She was born and raised in Argentina, and has also lived and worked in the Netherlands.
Frustrated by the daily bombardment of advertising on the streets of New York City, artist Caroline Caldwell and writer RJ Rushmore decided to produce a project that would dampen the sheer volume of visual marketing strewn throughout their environment. The pair didn’t have the budget to prompt an entire overhaul, but they did have the incentive to construct an intervention that would offer an alternative glimpse to the city’s high volume of print-based advertisements.
For their 2017 project, Art in Ad Places, the pair recruited 55 artists and collectives from across the country to produce 55 works to be temporarily displayed on pay phone booths across New York City. The installations were each presented for a week, and documented by their collaborator, street art photographer Luna Park.