Brazil Modern at R & Company

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R & Company
2 Franklin Street
New York, NY 10013
November 10, 2015 – January 7, 2016

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Brazil certainly isn't the first country I think of when it comes to contemporary furniture design, but the current exhibition at R & Company is changing my perspective. Featuring important designs, textiles and ephemera from the 20th century, the show includes pieces from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo between the late 1940s and early 1970s.

—R & Company

Matt Paweski – New Sculpture

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South Willard
8038 West 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90048
November 8 – December 10, 2015

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New Sculpture is a series of recent works from the LA-based sculptor Matt Paweski, which opened this weekend, and is the latest in a long line of in-store exhibitions at South Willard. The show consists of a range of geometric and abstract sculptural works, utilizing European beech hardwood, steel, aluminum rivets, and acrylic.

—South Willard

Cy Twombly – Sculptures

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Philadelphia Museum of Art
2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, PA 19130 
Until February 2016

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"Taking cues from the Dada movement and from the work of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, Cy Twombly created poetic objects whose serene white surfaces and allusive forms seem to recall remote worlds of myth and the ancient past. After reaching an indisputable maturity in his early sculpture, created from 1946 to 1959, Twombly returned to working in three dimensions in the mid-1970s and continued to cast new works up until his passing in 2011. When asked shortly before his death whether any of his sculptures might be considered companions to his masterful series of ten paintings Fifty Days at Iliam of 1978 (installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989), the artist responded by choosing a selection of extraordinary bronzes, five of which are on view in this installation.”

—Philadelphia Museum of Art

Mary Heilmann – Geometrics: Waves, Roads, etc.

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303 Gallery
507 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
November 5 – December 19, 2015

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“Wryly poking around the history of abstract painting from both within and without it, Heilmann's imaginative approach to the geometries of spaces, things, and thoughts has made her one of the foremost painters of her generation. Adopting waves and roads as inspiration for many of the works in this show, Heilmann's deft perceptive logics suggest simultaneously intimate and expansive experiences.

In Heilmann's paintings, waves and roads each generate their own sources of life. They move and travel and interlock. Positive and negative space inhabit alternating roles, as colours riff on memory in vibrant undulations as well as protracted expanses. Heilmann's geometrics abut forms and steer the eye backward between them and seemingly through them. In San Andreas (2012), a glowing red core pokes through chunks of earthy green glazed ceramic, its tactile surface bubbling with tension. In The Geometry of a Wave, a tiny painting on paper suggests an entire universe in two colours. Pigment pools in the paper's irregular crevices, as a wave's fragile surface is rendered with a penetrating directness.”

—303 Gallery

Modern Design in Britain: An exhibition curated by Margaret Howell from The Ken Stradling Collection

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34 Wigmore Street
London W1U 2RS
October 15 – November 15, 2015

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If you live in London or find yourself passing through in the next two weeks, you really should visit this fantastic exhibition before it finishes. Featuring over 50 items from the Ken Stradling Collection in Bristol, carefully chosen by Margaret Howell and interspersed throughout her Wigmore Street store, it pays particular attention to a selection of furniture designed by Marcel Breuer in the 1930s. These very special pieces are complimented by a range of glass, ceramic and household objects from the likes of Per Lütken, Betty Blandino and Robert Welch.

—Margaret Howell
—The Ken Stradling Collection
—Online Feature: Modern Design in Britain

Seth and Sheila Stayed Behind

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Hardcover, 40 pages
29 x 21.5 cm
Edited by Jeff Khonsary
Designed by The Future
Published by New Documents, 2015

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Seth Fluker's latest project is a collaboration with author, and fellow Toronto native, Sheila Heti. The pairing of Seth's photographs with Sheila’s abstract narrative about longing and transition, creates a balanced and interesting mix throughout the 40-page publication, which was recently launched at Art Metropole. Seth also produced a window installation for the event, featuring the same wintery landscapes captured in this unique and beautiful book.

—Available from Art Metropole and New Documents

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia

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Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55403
October 24, 2015 – February 28, 2016

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“This Walker-organized exhibition, assembled with the assistance of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, examines the intersections of art, architecture, and design with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. A time of great upheaval, this period witnessed a variety of radical experiments that challenged societal and professional expectations, overturned traditional hierarchies, explored new media and materials, and formed alternative communities and new ways of living and working together. During this key moment, many artists, architects, and designers individually and collectively began a search for a new kind of utopia, whether technological, ecological, or political, and with it offered a critique of the existing society.

Presenting a broad range of art forms and artifacts of the era, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia features experimental furniture, alternative living structures, immersive and participatory media environments, alternative publishing and ephemera, and experimental film. Bringing into dramatic relief the limits of Western society’s progress, the exhibition explores one of the most vibrant and inventive periods of the not-too-distant past, one that still resonates within culture today.”

—Walker Art Center

Labyrinth of Undercover

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Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
3-20-2 Nishishinjuku, Shinjuku
Tokyo 163-1403 Japan
October 10 – December 23, 2015

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This fall Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery is hosting Labyrinth of Undercover, an exhibition celebrating the brand's past 25 years. The show will trace the history of Undercover through a collection archive which will also include runway footage and design notes from Jun Takahashi.

—Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery
—Undercover