Salone Del Mobile 2023 Brings the Newest Faces in Design to Milan
At Salone del Mobile, design’s biggest names and up-and-comers descend on every corner of Milan.
Salone del Mobile, the largest design fair in the world, would stretch for miles if laid end to end. But that wouldn’t even account for half of what constitutes Milan Design Week when it roars through the ancient canal city that Mussolini paved in his haste. Like an annual rainstorm that shakes the city, Design Week seems to seep into all of Milan’s hidden corners. It is in these verdant tucked-away spots that one finds a dearth of transformed boutiques, artistic interventions, group showcases, and top-notch gallery shows. And while these activations are technically all part of the same phenomenon, it is impossible to find a central index for all that is on offer, as many of them are independent initiatives. That’s the beauty of Milan as an axis of art, design, and fashion—its residents are so immersed and comfortable in engaging at the highest level of these disciplines that they feel emboldened to participate, no matter what their own visibility is. You’ll stumble upon everything from tiny pop-ups all the way to global launches at mega-brand boutiques like Loewe and Prada. And what is truly astonishing is the quality of the work you’ll encounter across this spectrum. Before the festivities kick off in April, we made a list of designers whose work will be on view, but will also resonate in the streets long after the cherry blossoms fall.
This year’s Salone del Mobile theme, Euroluce, places an emphasis on lighting. Meaning that the biggest names in design—Knoll, Vitra, Kohler, and Molteni&C—will bust out their brightest inventions and collaborations. Most of the reveals are saved for the week of, but expect major revelations by iconoclasts like FormaFantasma, Gaetano Pesce, and Tom Dixon. The latter is expanding his dazzling Puff collection; disco is back at last.
Salone del Mobile’s up-and-coming section, SaloneSatellite, never fails to turn us on to new names. The Madrid-based designer Octavio Asensio revels in all the experimentation that the job entitles him to. Asensio’s furniture and consumer-facing products come out of that exuberant material rough-housing, as do some of the one-off sculptures he produces from time to time. The former comes into view at Salone as a field of new stools that conjure a meeting scene in their number. Like a Quaker meeting house, everything in sight is made of the same materials, with no tricks holding them together. In the case of Asensio’s work, the shapes are asymmetrical and evocative of the simple, hollow shapes of children’s coloring books. The look is sleek and seamless but ultimately casual. The stools can be dressed up, maybe with a pillow acting almost as a hat, but they also look good bareheaded, especially when grouped with a gaggle of friends. Asensio’s work has a nice dialogue with both Loewe’s meditation on stick chairs, as well as with the work of another young designer in the satellite section: Tatu Laakso.
You'll stumble upon everything from tiny pop-ups all the way to global launches at mega-brand boutiques.
Truthfully, it wasn’t just the nice echoes of wood across the halls. Laakso had us at chaise lounge. The Finnish designer might be our new go-to for a seat in the great outdoors and indoors, thanks to his refreshingly no-fuss take on a wooden beach chair, the Manta, which on-sight had us visualizing a tin mug of coffee in one hand and the paper in the other. An alternative to something like an Adirondack chair, with whispers of Gaetano Pesce’s beloved Shadow and Feltri armchairs thrown in, the Manta, with its blanket seat and criss-crossed wooden frame, evokes something playful yet ultimately minimal; it’s Italian radicalism viewed through the minimalist lens of Northern European essentialism and eco logic. It’s fun to think about what could happen if Laakso opened up the palette to something more Franz West, and where that would take the references.
Off-site there are some evolutions. Last year, we’d noted Grace Prince as a young name to watch, and now the artist is back in a more mature form, with a solo exhibition at Oxilia Gallery. Picking up on the ghostly minimalism she’d piloted in her first collections, the curator Alexander Mays’ favorite debuts “Displaced Line,” a series of three new objects, including a candelabra and a room divider. Flirting with precarity in perpetuity, Prince’s works, which effortlessly seam wood and metal fragments, remind us of Alexander Calder mobiles in the way they seem to defy gravity’s grip with minimal force. There is an Arte Povera elementalism that pervades. Materials are not proudly nailed or screwed; instead, they lean and kiss. The resulting collisions are in fact functional, but aesthetically, they read less like furniture than as a dreamy collage in three dimensions.
Last year, Objects of Common Interest blew us away at the off-site fair, Alcova, with their foiled-coated room and tubular lights. This year, the Athens and New York–based design studio has returned, having graduated from the DIY fair to Nilufar Gallery, one of the city’s most influential bellwethers. Picking up on the annual theme of light, the designer duo Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis interpreted it through their own library of references to present Poikilos, a new collection of iridescent resin objects that are unique in their no-waste molding process but also in the undulating silhouettes their secret recipe allows for. Passed down by a local Greek souvenir craftsman in 2019, the resin technique has enabled the peripatetic duo to experiment with shapes other resin methods had not allowed for. Reminiscent of honey, amber, or beeswax, there is a tension between translucence and opalescence in this specialty plastic that draws light into the pieces and makes them seem to almost glow from within. The final pieces have reference lists a mile long, starting with art history thrills like imagining them in conversation with Heidi Bucher’s latex skin imprints of her kitchen floor dusted in crushed mother of pearl, or one of Robert Gober’s waxy detached extremities.
Collaborations are a key component of the design week sauce, and it’s the unexpected friendships the week generates that tend to outlast the pop-up spaces they inhabit. For example, we are now following Loehr, thanks to “The Archive of Thought,” a Northern European alliance that brought together the up-and-coming German design studio with the established Swedish lighting company, Wästberg, and Berlin’s Form Magazine. Loehr caught our attention for the economy they achieve in each product and the attention they pay to every decision. It’s no wonder that their imagery often shouts out to Minimalist pioneers like Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd. They share primary colors with Kelly, and Judd’s proclivity for exacting dimensions. At Design Week, Loehr presents a modular shelving system and dining room table that will play nicely with Wästberg’s vast library of works by masters like David Chipperfield and Ilse Crawford. Held at dopo?, a multipurpose space that has been getting more and more attention in Milan, "The Archive of Thought” is a perfect illustration of how the grassroots crack the foundation here by joining forces.
