BEAUTY: Sculpture--Kevin Francis Gray

I last posted about the marvelous work of sculptor Kevin Francis Gray a dozen years ago and his work since then has become amazingly abstract and gestural. After mastering figures draped in silky, diaphanous material (seen here), he is now taking the texture and silhouette of raw clay, especially the way it moves, and rendering those figures in marble. His Picasso-esque Family Series and Gestural Series stands out.

https://www.kevinfrancisgray.com/

The Kitchens of Michelle Nussbaumer

Interior designer Michelle Nussbaumer has not one, not two, not three, but four kitchens in her home in Dallas, Texas.

The wild Main Kitchen (which, it should be noted, won House Beautiful's 2019 Kitchen of the Year!) is a natural blend of Art Deco and Mayan influences...a Mayan design sense is one of the many motifs that influenced the Art Deco movement in the 1920s. But she pairs it with an homage to the sculptor Louise Nevelson all along an upper cabinetry wall.

The Mayan mural is custom, the doors and windows are cased in Rosso Marquina marble, and the cabinetry is carnation, navy, and black lacquer. The kitchen also has two matching pantries, one for porcelain storage and the other for food storage.

Here is an image, below, of a monumental sculpture by Louise Nevelson called Big Black, created in 1963, currently at MOMA in Manhattan. The MOMA sites says, "To create this sculpture, Nevelson stacked boxes against a wall and filled each compartment with found wooden scraps including moldings, dowels, spindles, and furniture parts. She then covered the entire assemblage with black paint, both unifying the composition and obscuring the individual objects." You can see how Nussbaumer used this design to replicate Nevelson's iconic work.

And here are the stunning pantries...

The next kitchen, on the second floor, is what Nussbaumer calls the Art Kitchen. Part Moroccan, part Mexican, it was created to celebrate the designer's love of travel to exotic locations. The pattern mixing here is bold and breathtaking--and totally works.

The Speakeasy Kitchen with its extensive wine collection has the sense of a Gentlemen's Club from long ago. The designer created the grass-cloth wallpaper with Paul Montgomery to evoke Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt, in Mayan lands.

The last space called simply The Cocktail Bar is jaw-dropping in its scale (the ceiling height must be at around twelve or thirteen feet!) as well as for the black marble cladding. Nussbaumer says, "I was looking for an art deco bar that felt like we were somewhere else in time and yet still current. I had taken the photo of the mural years ago and saved it. With the help of Paul Montgomery studios, we brought to life the spectacular image. It’s based on the story written by Rudyard Kipling, THE JUNGLE BOOK."

https://michellenussbaumer.com/

Indefinite Vases by Studio E.O.

It is easy to forget that glass is not a solid--it is a a liquid. And these marvelous vases by Erik Olovsson of Studio E.O. in Stockholm bring that point home. I love how each vase has been blown to drape, droop, slip, or slide over a gorgeous polished piece of marble, granite, or onyx. Playful, whimsical, and biomorphic.

http://studioeo.se/

BEAUTY: Design--Mathieu Lehanneur

Designer Mathieu Lehanneur's imagination and vision are amazing. He has created objects, furniture, installations, products, stores, but it was this light that first caught my attention. Entitled "Les Cordes," the idea of a chandelier or ceiling light is stripped down into something entirely minimalistic, functional, futuristic, but breathtakingly lovely. The organic-looking cords of LED lights seem to drip from and return to the ceiling plane on their own. And I just love the contrast between this spartan, futuristic sensibility and the Beaux-Arts style of the building, Château Borely, in Marseille. Stunning work.

For Milan Design Week 2013, Lehanneur, in collaboration with Turkish Stones, created a piece called "Liquid Marble," a small shed of a space made of marble with an interior churning "pool" also made from marble. Of the disorienting piece, Lehanneur says, "I hope that, when entering this room, the visitor will experience something that comes closes to what happened to the many characters who opened a magic portal to a forbidden place in so many fairytales. Everything is liquid in this space, evanescent, and yet it is executed in a material that is the most solid imaginable."

And perhaps the most spectacular piece in Lehanneur's portfoilio is the Choir at the Romanesque St. Hilaire Church in Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France. He layered slices of white marble to resemble isobars, put the baptistry in one of the depressions, and used natural onyx for the altar and ambo. Again, the contrast of the ancient architecture with this sleek, modern addition brings a beautiful tension and makes the space vital and current.

http://www.mathieulehanneur.fr/