Gift This
Bed Linens and Bath Towels in Shades of Moss and Butter Yellow
Since its founding in 2012, the Copenhagen-based clothing brand Baserange has become a go-to for its bodywear and undergarments with minimalist silhouettes. Co-founders Blandine Legait and Marie-Louise Mogensen started it with the goal of creating pieces that would allow movement and provide comfort. Now, they’re expanding into homewares with a similar mission. The Baserange Home collection is launching with towels, tablecloths and bed linens in the brand’s signature earthy hues (including terra cotta, dusty pink and foggy gray), made with organic cotton and EcoVero viscose, a material composed of wood fibers harvested from forests that are certified sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council. The designers intend the line to be adaptable: The Yoga Mat towel announces its multiple uses in its name, while Mogensen imagines “taking a home on the go” by bringing the striped Shell towel out of the bath and onto the beach or rolling it up to stuff in the oblong Shell pillowcase while traveling. The Baserange Home collection launches Sept. 18; from $40, baserange.com.
Go Here
Chowa Library Brings Japanese Design to Bushwick
New Yorkers looking for a moment of calm can now find sanctuary in a former warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn. In the basement of the BogArt building, which otherwise houses artist studios and galleries, Chowa Library occupies a serene, lofted space. Kumbuk wood from Sri Lanka lines the floor, while some walls are made of mud mixed with sawdust to create texture. Although it’s called a library (and though there are some books to browse), it’s also a shop, a teahouse, a Japanese design showroom and a general relaxation area — no cellphones or shoes allowed. (Lockers are available upon entry.) The graphic designer Ray Suzuki, who was born in New York and raised in Tokyo, first started Chowa as a brand. He imported traditional kiri-bako, Japanese wooden boxes used in tea ceremonies, to the U.S. in 2023 and also created a lamp made from the box, all of which are sold at Chowa Library, which opened in July. Here, Suzuki hopes to share “the story of not just the box, but the culture surrounding it that’s unique to us.” On one wall is a small door, inspired by a teahouse entryway in Kyoto, that forces visitors to stoop down as they walk in, symbolizing that all are equal. Reservations are necessary, and 60 percent of each entrance fee is donated to the Association for the Promotion of Traditional Craft Industries in Japan. Entry from $25 for a 2.5-hour visit, chowalibrary.com.
See This
An Artist’s Abstract Exploration of the Body
The Indianapolis-born artist Meeson Pae has become known for her lush oil paintings in which oozing fluids and roseate flesh merge with hard-edge machinery. At her debut solo show, “Permeate,” opening this month at Anat Ebgi gallery in Los Angeles, Pae’s wider oeuvre will be on view for the first time through an array of abstracted paintings, sculptures and videos. Her work is informed by the childhood loss of her younger brother to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and by her desire to understand how our bodies function. She begins many of her pieces by iterating on basic shapes — such as spheres — using 3-D sculpting programs, which she likens to hand building with clay. “Confronting death at an early age and experiencing the fragility of the body, there was an early understanding of uncontrollable forces,” she says. “In the digital realm you can defy gravity, apply any lighting scenario and create impossible vantage points.” And though we might associate computer-generated riffing with smoothness and predictability, Pae insists it’s the opposite: “These built environments are processed through machines that have uncontrollable errors and glitches that leave markings, etching, and memory of process and time.” One such work is the sculpture “Accretion” (2024), in which two industrial steel poles are crowned with 3-D-printed resin mounds that might be testicles, breasts or organs. “The bulbous forms are meant to evoke something simultaneously organic and structural,” says Pae, “blurring the line between the body and the architecture that supports it.” “Permeate” will be on view Sept. 21 through Nov. 2 at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, anatebgi.com.
Read This
Books That Capture Fashionable Collaborations — and Clashes
This fall sees the release of three coffee table books that consider fashion from different perspectives. “The Battle of Versailles: The Fashion Showdown of 1973,” which was published by Rizzoli last week, chronicles the dramatic 1973 runway face-off between French designers (Marc Bohan, Pierre Cardin, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent and Emanuel Ungaro) and their American counterparts (Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Oscar de la Renta, Halston and Anne Klein) and is illustrated with largely unseen images from the archives of the fashion photojournalists Bill Cunningham and Jean-Luce Huré. As Liza Minnelli writes in the book’s foreword, “The Battle of Versailles is one glittering waypoint — an event where fashion, music and art collided in a spectacle of transatlantic glamour.” “ALAÏA / GRÈS beyond fashion,” out Oct. 22, is published by Damiani in conjunction with a 2023 exhibition at the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris that paired creations by the Tunisian designer with sculptural draped gowns by Madame Grès, whose designs Alaïa extensively collected. Although they never met, the book highlights the parallels between the two couturiers (a mastery of cut and design, a tendency toward uncompromising perfectionism), creating a dialogue across time and space. Finally, the monograph “Simone Rocha” (Rizzoli, Oct. 8) is not just an extensive survey of the designer’s collections but a catalog of her inspirations, which range from Irish poetry to Louise Bourgeois. It also features contributions from the likes of the actress Chloë Sevigny, the artist Cindy Sherman and the photographer Petra Collins. “It started as a documentation of the last decade, but it evolved into conversations with collaborators and people I admire, bringing a new perspective of my work to the table,” says Rocha. “It felt like the right time to share it all and reflect, so I can start a new creative chapter.”
Covet This
Handmade Furniture Inspired by Sardinian Culture
The California-born set designer Kyre Chenven and the Italian graffiti artist Ivano Atzori lived together in New York and Milan before moving to Sardinia in 2016. After years of being in cities, they wanted “a new sense of time and belonging,” says Atzori, whose family has lived in the area for generations. In a previously abandoned farming village on the southwestern edge of the Mediterranean island, the couple established Pretziada, a joint creative practice through which they’ve produced writing and photography projects and design objects and hosted an on-site artist residency program. They also offer rental stays in several renovated cottages on their property, known as Luxi Bia.
This week, Pretziada ventures into furniture design with the release of two collections that celebrate Sardinian iconography and craftsmanship. The 1946 Cabinet collection, made with the third-generation woodworker Pierpaolo Mandis and the family-run metal workshop La Nuova Fucina, is named for the year the Sardinian artist Costantino Nivola and the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier met in New York, and features oversize chestnut veneer panels and sand-cast bronze handles. To design the Bobboi bed collection (named for the Sardinian word for “sweet”), also made by Mandis from hand-carved chestnut wood, the couple referenced geometric motifs from local delicacies, including snake-shaped tiliccas — cookies made from almond paste and grape must — and zigzag-trimmed sweet ravioli called coccias. Both collections now furnish Casa Corte, the newest two-bedroom rental on the property, and can also be handmade to order. From about $3,630, pretziada.com.
Visit This
Ten Years of Jordan Casteel’s Portraits and Landscapes, on View in Manhattan
Before putting brush to canvas, the painter Jordan Casteel begins her work with a camera. “My photographs are usually pretty scrappy,” the artist says of the quick snaps she takes of strangers, acquaintances and loved ones before rendering them as vibrant oil portraits. Because her subjects aren’t typically present in the studio while she works, Casteel uses her reference material as well as her mind’s eye to create each painting. “They trust me entirely to represent them through my own field of view, quite literally,” she says. Casteel’s dynamic perspective is the focal point of “Field of view,” her latest solo exhibition at the Hill Art Foundation in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. Curated by Lauren Haynes, the show features works created between 2014 and 2024, including portraits as well as landscapes and acid-hued botanical still lifes, which Casteel has been painting with greater frequency since she began living between upstate New York and Harlem in 2021. “It’s a compilation of things that feel and create a sense of home for me,” she says of the exhibition. One-of-a-kind furniture pieces by the fashion designer Batsheva Hay will appear alongside Casteel’s paintings as another way to immerse visitors in the artist’s viewpoint. (Hay, a friend of Casteel’s, designed the painter’s wedding dress and created a chair she keeps in her upstate studio.) “It’s like a giant scrapbook,” Casteel says of the show’s colorful mix of art and décor. “[The pieces] are all markers of the places that I’ve been that I look at and care about, and the people that I meet along the way.” “Field of view” will be on view from Sept. 13 through Nov. 23 at the Hill Art Foundation, New York, hillartfoundation.org.
From T’s Instagram
In the South of France, a Utopian Town Inspired by Ancient Pyramids
The post No Shoes, No Phones Allowed at This Brooklyn Shop appeared first on New York Times.
