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Mar 26 2024
Surface
Design Dispatch
Daniel Arsham’s instinctual photography, a collectible design gallery bets on Brussels, and a “shoppable comedy store.”
FIRST THIS
“I like theater. I like to take you on a journey.”
HERE’S THE LATEST

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For Daniel Arsham, Photography Is More Instinctual Than Art

What’s Happening: The artist is most well-known for eroded casts of objects and his serial collaborations with luxury brands, but he’s amassed a trove of personal photography over the past 30 years, now starring in a monograph and Fotografiska show.

The Download: On Daniel Arsham’s 11th birthday, his grandfather gave him a Pentax K1000 and explained its function in simple terms. “Focus, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO,” he wrote in the introduction of his new monograph, Daniel Arsham: Photographer, which accompanies a solo exhibition that recently opened at Fotografiska New York. “By using those four elements together and combining them in unique ways, the possibilities for producing images become infinite.” It immediately piqued his interest—he started by photographing the front doors in the South Florida suburb where he grew up, fascinated by how different colors and door knockers gave them personality in an otherwise cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood. “I understood almost immediately,” he says, “that the camera required its operator to see and understand their surroundings in a deeper and more critical way.”


Arsham began documenting his life—and his budding sculptural practice—through photography. Though he’s most well-known for eroded casts of cultural objects and high-profile collaborations with the likes of Porsche, Tiffany, and Dior, the prolific artist and Snarkitecture co-founder has snapped more than 200,000 pictures as somewhat of a personal archive. Where his sculptures are tinged with surrealism and the unsettling notion of today’s relics excavated in the future, his photography is pure diaristic realism. “Photography for me is much more instinctual,” Arsham tells Surface. “[It’s] more about the exercise of doing it than something conscious.” Yet it echoes themes often explored in his sculptures, which are dotted throughout the Fotografiska show. Exposures of a twinkling night sky explore his signature black-and-white palette; a silhouetted family in the American Museum of Natural History plays with negative space.

Many of the photographs were only intended for Arsham’s eyes—and he scoured a trove of negatives and hard drives to select the ones that would make the exhibition and book. “Because I never took photographs with the intention of showing them, they were about documenting and understanding,” he says. “The input to another medium’s output.” Despite the clear delineation, photography is just as vital—and personal—of a creative outlet for him. Arsham dedicated the monograph to his late grandfather, without whom many of these photographs may not exist.


He suffered another loss when Hurricane Andrew struck Florida, damaging his home and ruining his images of the doors. One remained: a grainy photograph that his mother took of a teenaged Arsham posing with his beloved Pentax, the Grand Canyon’s vast expanse behind him. It’s the book’s final photograph. “As much as I liked the images that came out of that,” he says, “I loved the object even more, the camera.”

In Their Own Words: “Photography is much more direct,” Arsham says, “so it feels less about creating something new and instead more about capturing, whereas art is conjuring something that didn’t exist before.”

Surface Says: Our favorite picture from the bunch isn’t of a sculpture or cityscape—it’s of the late great Virgil Abloh, just as he was making his ascent.

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What Else Is Happening?

Check-Circle_2x The New Museum closes until early 2025 for an expansion, which is peeving some locals.
Check-Circle_2x Copenhagen Fashion Week bans clothes with virgin fur, wild animal skins, or feathers.
Check-Circle_2xBjarke Ingels Group and A+ Architects unveil a mass timber transport hub in Toulouse.
Check-Circle_2x Tennessee becomes the first U.S. state to protect musicians against AI impersonation.
Check-Circle_2x Antoni Gaudí’s long-delayed Sagrada Familia basilica is slated for completion by 2026.


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RESTAURANT

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A Long-Awaited Hidden South American Gem Glistens in Singapore

If you want to dine at Araya, which is located in Singapore’s Mondrian property, you’ll have to find it first. Pull that off, and a rose-colored jewel awaits. Chef-partners Francisco Araya and Fernanda Guerrero bring together the beauty of Chile’s landscapes with a mélange of flavors from their collective experiences with cuisine spanning Japanese, Middle Eastern, and South American cultures. Thanks to interior designer Emma Maxwell, who worked closely with Araya and Guerrero to realize their vision, coziness emanates from the blush-toned interiors in the forms of rose quartz slabs, copper and bronze finishes, and an abundance of cognac leather.

Of course, there’s more to a destination restaurant than a feast for the eyes: expect dishes like Brazilian fish stew, made with coconut oil and the Japanese kinki fish, or a delicate orange meringue with apple custard and orange flan. To drink, don’t sleep on the ample selection of Chile’s Seña: a blended red wine whose every vintage, it seems, is lauded by critics.

DESIGN

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A Collectible Design Gallery Bets Big on Brussels

As its name suggests, the Belgian gallery Objects With Narratives prefers to show collectible design pieces with riveting backstories. And when founders Nik Vandewyngaerde, his brother Robbe, and longtime friend Oskar Eryatmaz learned about the history of a landmark Beaux-Arts building in Brussels’ historic Place du Grand Sablon, it was difficult to pass up establishing their previously nomadic gallery in the resplendent 21,000-square-foot interior. In the 1920s, the address was home to the sales room and workshop of Belgian furrier Raymond Mallien before becoming a museum and the auction house of Yves Saint Laurent co-founder Pierre Bergé. Original details like gilded moldings, fanciful frescoes, and shimmering chandeliers remain intact, lending an eye-catching backdrop to the array of expressive objects on offer.


In the front room, those range from an oversized pillowy marble cocktail table by Ben Storms and a dynamite-shaped copper sideboard by Mircea Anghel to Laurids Gallée’s translucent sky-blue resin console that mirrors a nearby fresco’s cloudy hues. Other spaces, specifically the whitewashed former workshops upstairs, will feature rotating exhibitions with a special focus on Belgian designers. Storms and Lionel Jadot enjoyed dedicated solo shows when the gallery opened earlier this month, coinciding with the like-minded design show Collectible’s seventh edition. Expect more spotlights on homegrown talents in the future—besides serving as an investment in the Belgian capital’s potential as a cultural hub to one day rival London or Paris, the founders are hoping to support the local economy and shine an international lens on designers who may otherwise be overlooked.

TRAVEL

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A Glamorous Throwback to the Golden Age of Train Travel in Italy

Milanese masters Dimore Studio are lending their theatrical touch to one of travel’s most storied names: Orient Express. The new La Dolce Vita Express is set to transport travelers through Italy immersed in sumptuous 1960s décor celebrating Italian design legends like Gio Ponti and Gae Aulenti. The nine multi-night journeys, which depart next spring, will whisk guests between destinations such as Venice, Portofino, Siena, and Sicily aboard 12 deluxe cabins and 18 suites decked in rich oranges, brass, and fabrics evoking vintage Italian style.

In the train’s bar car, live music sets the mood for classic Italian pastimes like backgammon and the card game Scopa, with classic aperitivo cocktails on pour. In tribute to the golden age of train travel, Orient Express pulls out the flourishes, from East-meets-West soirées replete with handwritten invites and onsite storytellers to choreographed turndown service tuned to the repertoire of the house pianist. Itineraries are available to book starting in April.

DESIGNER OF THE DAY


Hollie Bowden describes herself as a “lover of minimalism but with the soul of an unstoppable collector”—and it perfectly encapsulates the London-based designer’s restrained yet theatrical interiors for discerning clients from European hoteliers to High Street jewelers. She constantly scours dealers, antique markets, and old books to stay inspired and expand her gigantic vintage collection, which she deploys not only in captivating projects like rough-hewn Ibiza villas and rustic Scottish farmhouses but also The Gallery, her curated Shoreditch shop that’s teeming with historic chairs, collectible oddities, and rare objects once reserved for clients.

EXHIBITION

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A Grand Contemporary Art Collection Lives On, Online

During their lives, the art collection of Emily Hall Tremaine and Burton G. Tremaine, Sr. was the stuff of legend. Works from their former collection—including those by Graham Sutherland, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Piet Mondrian, and Robert Rauschenberg—are now in the holdings of the Met, the National Gallery of Art, and more. The public’s access to such works is thanks to two landmark auctions in 1988 and 1991, which funded Emily’s eponymous foundation prior to her death in 1987.

Today, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation is debuting a digitized archive of the full collection, as well as with the couple’s personal letters to the artists they supported. Also included are the Emily Hall Tremaine Papers—an archive of more than 13,000 images in the holdings of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. If that wasn’t enough, the archive also launched with a context-rich suite of editorial content, including interviews with the Tremaines’ surviving friends. Among them? Larry Gagosian, architectural historian Voelker Welter, Tremaine’s biographer Kathleen Housely, and artist Bridget Riley.

THE LIST

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Member Spotlight: Thomas Hayes Studio

Thomas Hayes Studio offers striking modern furniture that is unique in its fidelity to the best elements of mid-century design. Pieces are conceived in the distinctive vision of Thomas Hayes and are the expert, elegant synthesis of the Californian Craftsman revolution and Brazilian design from that period.

Surface Says: By synthesizing influences from the California Craftsman revolution and modern Brazilian design, Thomas Hayes has cultivated a design signature all his own.

AND FINALLY

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Today’s Attractive Distractions

Selfridges opens a “shoppable comedy store” packed with slapstick generators.

Paris plans to distribute more than 300,000 condoms at this year’s Olympics.

A mystery plaque for an “adulterer” ignites suspicion of a new Banksy.

Laurent de Brunhoff painted the adventures of Babar for 70 years.

               


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