This year’s exceptional and diverse gallery program at Design Miami/ features thirty-four exhibitions accompanied by eleven Curio presentations representing venues from twelve countries around the world. Never-before-seen contemporary works will shine among the program offerings, re-discoveries of historic material long considered lost, and several trends uniting the design on view this year. Among the trends on view will be the use of industrial materials and processes; a sense of playfulness and whimsy; a focus on craft; modular designs; immersive installations; and Latin American design.

Contemporary Debuts and Commissions/ 
An innovator of materials, Marcin Rusak debuts his Perma Collection at Sarah Myerscough Gallery. A series of furniture made from discarded flowers sourced from florists that are bound in resin that is cut lengthwise, the work reveals colorful cross sections of the petals, stems, and buds when on display. Kasmin brings never-before-exhibited furniture by Mattia Bonetti that merges the more ornate aspects of seventeenth-century European architecture and sculpture with the surrealist visions of early twentieth-century painting while employing cutting-edge methods such as 3-D printing and robotics.

A sculptural stool and bench made of solid sandstone by Najla El Zein can be seen as two silhouettes wrapped in an embrace––the work was recently acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art where it was shown for the first time before coming to Design Miami/ with Friedman Benda. A new addition to Katie Stout’s infamous “girls” furniture, Triple Girl Floor Lamp, is on view at R & Company, along with a five-thousand-pound marble tub by the Haas Brothers.

Southern Guild launches a number of new works in bronze commissioned for the fair, including a biomorphic table by Kenyan-born sculptor Stanislaw Trzebinski; a pair of zoomorphic seats by rising star Atang Tshikare; Xandre Kriel’s reductive Vos Altar table, featuring folding steel legs and a softly textured bronze slab; and a near-abstract, monolithic console by Dylan Lewis, known for his bronze sculptures depicting African wildlife.

Reinventing Industrial Materials and Processes/
Sang Hoon Kim’s foam furniture series at Cristina Grajales Gallery is informed by his family’s three-generation foam factory. Kim pushes the material’s boundaries, layering foam and experimenting with ratios of chemical solutions––the result is vividly colored sofas, chaises, chairs, and tables. At Functional Art Gallery, Théophile Blandet’s works exemplify his belief that plastic will be banned entirely in the near future––he uses primitive tools to break, chop, burn, and melt a variety of industrial plastics to create furniture that seems to exist in another era.

Michael Young’s MY Collection debuts at Gallery ALL­­­––this furniture set, including a chair, side table, desk, coffee table, console, and lounge chair, is composed of hollow stainless-steel extrusions capped at each end with white enamel, creating a surface pattern and overall decorative appearance that is integral to their structure. At The Future Perfect, illustrative aluminum works from Chris Wolston employ body and jungle motifs inspired by his studio surroundings in Medellín, Colombia. In addition, Florian Idenburg (SO––IL) presents a stainless-steel bench resembling a deconstructed chain link fence at Friedman Benda.

Playful and Whimsical Design/
Salon 94 features Gaetano Pesce’s 54 Arm Lamp, one of his most iconic works, which allows the user to shape each arm according to his or her desire, demonstrating the designer’s humor and imagination. At Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Nacho Carbonell’s handcrafted, organically shaped, semitransparent cocoons are illuminated from the inside, encapsulating the designer’s imaginative impulse––the floor lamp is particularly striking due to its immense size, encompassing several lights attached to steel “branches” that expand to a height of more than two meters.

A play on the traditional rocking horse, Daniel Jackson’s life-sized Rocking Unicorn at Moderne Gallery was commissioned for fashion designer Wayne Rogers by his wife as a Christmas gift in 1974. Long thought to be lost and only recently rediscovered by the gallery, it is considered one of Jackson’s most important works. Hostler Burrows presents new hybrid animal ceramic works by Jasmin Anoschkin conjured from the designer’s own fantasy world and personal experiences created from stoneware with a 24k gold glaze.

Harry Nuriev’s Curio presentation The Office draws on comical and sentimental inspiration from the designer’s early professional life as a clerk in a small Russian bureau. He takes the standard props—a chair, desk, single hanger, printer, and wallpaper—and subverts and modernizes our expectations of the dour, windowless office. Porky Hefer’s human-scale nests and living pods at Southern Guild are both fantasy world and functional furniture—beautifully crafted, they evoke innocence and wild abandon; by engaging with these transformative works, viewers are invited to return to a childlike state.

A Focus on Craft and Process/ 
Etage Projects presents a group exhibition inspired by the art deco architecture of Miami Beach and on the inherent productivity of artistic collaboration. FOS, Guillermo Santomà, and Sabine Marcelis worked together to create the pieces on view, rotating them among one another, disrupting the traditional design process by allowing for multiple interpretations, developments, and subversions.

In her series 3 to 5 Seconds: Rapid handmade production, Jenny Nordberg researched mirror-making techniques from the nineteenth century, eventually creating her own using a thin layer of liquid silver applied to glass, where its uncontrolled movement results in a unique, unpredictable design. Nordberg’s mirrors at Hostler Burrows create a striking effect wherein one’s reflection appears almost as a haunting apparition, an ephemeral quality that contrasts dramatically with the immediacy of the design itself. At Galleria Antonella Villanova, Robert Baines’s gold Cosmos Brooch was made by applying the skills and knowledge acquired during his long career as a professor of gold and silversmithing. Todd Merrill Studio introduces Dominick Leuci’s Eques series, the first work of its kind to incorporate air-inflated metal sculptures with LED lighting. Working with custom-made air-blown plumes of stainless steel and LEDs, Eques achieves an uncanny sense of buoyancy.

Jean Cocteau created more than three hundred objects in the studio of ceramicists Marie Madeleine Jolly and Philippe Madeline in the French Riviera, where he also created a revolutionary process for drawing on clay––Lebreton has more than sixty ceramics by the artist assembled in the last twenty years. John Keith Russell’s collection of exceptional Shaker furniture includes a classic maple and pine trestle table made ca. 1830–40, one of only a handful of original, structurally unaltered examples known to exist. At Galerie Philippe Gravier, furniture by Rudy Ricciotti, including a solid walnut dining table, exemplifies quality materials and workmanship as each element is drawn and made by hand.

Unexpected and Modular Designs/
A piece by Gianni Pettena at Erastudio Apartment-Gallery is made up of a series of sedan chairs that come together to create a bed only when assembled according to a simple scheme that could, in theory, be continued ad infinitum.

On view at Magen H Gallery is one of Pierre Chapo’s rare free-form designs, the T22 table from 1972. An architectural work and artistic treasure, it features two modular parts and can be a coffee table, a dining table when fitted with tall legs, or a desk. SIDE Gallery is showing one of Martin Eisler and Carlo Hauner’s most important designs, the Reversible chair from 1955. Manufactured by Forma Moveis in Brazil, the wide and curved seat can be moved to the right or to the left.

At Pierre Marie Giraud, Sterling Ruby’s HEARTS reform and repurpose tabletop vessels into splayed organs and bisected torsos. Hung on the wall—the first time Ruby has presented ceramics in this manner—the HEARTS become both sacred and profane emblems embodying the sentimental, symbolic, and spiritual.

Immersive Environments/ 
Friedman Benda has turned their booth into a Japanese rock garden, incorporating natural and industrial materials to showcase work by gt2P, Joris Laarman, Florian Idenburg (SO—IL), Faye Toogood, and more. At Christina Grajales Gallery, works by Sang Hoon Kim, Stefan Bishop, Steven and William Ladd, Aaron Poritz, and more are installed in an environment dominated by the color pink––a color that was considered to be neutral in eighteenth-century painting but carries very different associations today related to gender, politics, and sexuality.

Galerie Patrick Seguin presents a full constructed Jean Prouvé 6 x 6 Demountable House from 1944. Originally designed to rehouse WWII victims, this example is outfitted as a fitness room equipped for a variety of activities, once again rendering Prouvé’s architecture entirely adaptable to the present day. Berlin-based Functional Art Gallery’s exhibition of seven new works by Théophile Blandet debuting at the fair also includes wall pieces in black to create a fully immersive environment.

Kasmin features an environment with a black and white backdrop highlighting a solo show of works both new and old by Mattia Bonetti with the finishes chosen by the designer. Jason Jacques presents ceramics by four female ceramicists placed within one, 17-foot-tall tower and two, 8-foot-tall towers by Digifabshop. Converso’s presentation recreates a living room space featuring works by Warren Platner including a custom sectional lining the parameters of the exhibition space, coffee table, brass log stand, rare ottoman prototype, wall sconces and more.

Colors and Materials Reign in Latin American Design/ 
Winners of the Design Miami/ Visionary Award, Pedro Reyes and Carla Fernández present a miniature retrospective of their work that seeks to address some of the fundamental concerns of our time, like immigration, gun proliferation, and planned obsolescence in manufacturing while facilitating the intimate human exchanges that have become increasingly rare in this digital age. Key works on view include Reyes’s Metate chairs, which are inspired by pre-Colombian artifacts, and examples from Reyes’s Disarm (2008)––musical instruments fabricated from destroyed firearms––as well as Fernandez’s textiles and the duo’s collaborative works. Works by Reyes will also be on display at Side Gallery within the fair.

Didier Ltd presents jewelry designed by Latin American artists from 1960 to 2000, examining five major themes: Surrealism, abstract sculpture, the figurative, Optical art, and Kinetic art, while exploring the utilization of new materials, especially plastics. Mercado Moderno has selected a collection of Brazilian mid-century modern pieces from the 1950s to 1970s by designers such as Joaquim Tenreiro and Zanine Caldas mixed with spirited contemporary pieces by Estúdio Mameluca.

kurimanzutto presents Sillas de México, a selection of chairs by architect and designer Oscar Hagerman based on his classic Arrullo chair from 1969, a mainstay of design in Mexican homes. Hagerman works in artisan workshops throughout rural Mexico, where he has learned techniques that respond and react to the climactic and cultural needs of each community. R & Company’s exhibition includes a set of eight dining chairs by Brazilian modernist Joaquim Tenreiro. His exquisitely crafted pieces evoke a refined coexistence of traditional values and modern aesthetics strongly bound to the Brazilian cultural milieu.

Schedule of Events/

Preview Day/ By invitation only/
Tuesday, December 4/
Collectors Preview/ 12–5PM
Opening Night Preview/ 5–7PM

Vernissage/
Wednesday, December 5, 10AM–12PM

Public Show Days/
Wednesday, December 5, 12–8PM
Thursday, December 6, 10AM–8PM
Friday, December 7, 11AM–8PM
Saturday, December 8, 12–8PM
Sunday, December 9, 12–6PM

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