Oslo has been ambitiously reinventing itself in the last few years; dramatic new architectural monuments like the National Museum and the Deichman Bjørvika library are invigorating the harbor city. And this week marks the arrival of a sensational place to stay: the 11-room Villa Inkognito in Oslo’s elegant Frogner neighborhood. A black-and-white entrance hall gives way to colorful public spaces, making plain that its interior designers — Adam Greco and Alice Lund, the duo behind the studio GrecoDeco — had fun as they updated the former residence from the 1870s. Every room is a joyful mash up of historically inspired wallpapers, jewel-toned painted walls, wood paneling and a mix of antique and custom-designed furniture. “We wanted to keep some of its original Victorian-style interiors but also add some inspiration from other design movements at that time: Art Nouveau, English Arts and Crafts movement and the trend of collecting objects from Asia,” says Greco. Although the Villa is technically part of the six-month-old Sommerro hotel (the main building, also designed by GrecoDeco, houses 231 rooms with an Art Deco public bath and swimming pool) and is connected to it by a discreet walkway, it was designed to be its own intimate space with access to a private kitchen and chef. The ground floor is made up of common rooms including Spectre, an honesty bar with silver gilded walls and tiles of salvaged golden onyx. Greco hopes that guests feel like they’re “staying in an eccentric private mansion.” From $615 a night, villainkognito.com.
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The Mexico City Boutique Curating Folk Art With a Sense of Humor
For the past three years, the interior designer Renata Prieto and the graphic designer Santiago Fernández have been visiting artisans’ workshops throughout Mexico in search of the most intriguing and amusing pieces. Normally it’s not the first item they find, nor the most popular, but rather the one where the artisan has decided to experiment with new shapes or colors. It might be a handmade Minion miniature, a coin purse that could be mistaken for an avocado or a saltshaker in the shape of a penguin wearing a hat. The latter inspired the name of the boutiques where Prieto and Fernández curate and sell such objects. At Pingüino’s three colorful spaces (two in Mexico City and one in Merida), the lines between traditional Mexican aesthetics and pop imagery are blurred, offering a reminder not to take things too seriously — and perhaps prompting questions: “We could tell you the story behind each piece,” says Férnandez. “We truly handpicked them all.” pinguinomexico.com.
Consider the butt. That is the focus, to be straightforward about it, of the new exhibition “Rear View” at LGDR gallery on New York’s Upper East Side. In art, a person seen from behind is a concept that can be traced to antiquity, but this perspective took on a life of its own as a Romantic trope, particularly among German painters in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Rückenfigur (“back figure”), as Dieter Roelstraete writes in the exhibition’s introductory essay, signified a “theatrical refusal to partake in the making of our … brave new world.” (The other essay in the zine, written by Alison M. Gingeras, is titled “Bad Asses.”)
Gathered here are prominent posteriors across a variety of genres, styles and media by the likes of Francis Bacon, Fernando Botero, Cecily Brown, John Currin, Edgar Degas, Urs Fischer, Barkley L. Hendricks, Danielle Mckinney and Yoko Ono, who once described her 1967 “Film No. 4 (Bottoms),” a protest against the Vietnam War, as “an aimless petition signed by people with their anuses.” With a knowing sense of humor, “Rear View” makes a compelling case that, in a chaotic age, simply turning one’s back can be a meaningful gesture. As a bonus, a separate, simultaneous exhibition explores full frontal nudity. “Rear View” is on view through June 1, lgdr.com.
Drink Here
A Farm-Inspired Bar in Downtown Albuquerque
Los Poblanos, a farm in Albuquerque’s north valley with a plush hotel, spa and restaurant, is expanding into the drinks business. Last October, the company opened Town and Ranch, a distillery and tasting room, in a former tractor dealer in a downtown industrial neighborhood that’s being reshaped by breweries and roasteries. In a room now draped with velvet curtains, bartenders pour Los Poblanos’s new line of spirits, distilled only a couple of feet away in large copper alembic stills. One of the two signature gins features lavender — the star crop of the farm and a key ingredient in Los Poblanos soaps and lotions — while the other, called Western Dry, is made from botanicals of the Rio Grande Valley such as pinyon, rose and chamomile.
Beside the bar is a shop stocked with giftable food and home items, as well as bottles of wine and Los Poblanos Botanical Spirits gin. Another Los Poblanos outpost, Farm Shop Norte, which houses a second bar and retail space, opened in Santa Fe in November. lospoblanos.com.
Raised in Kyiv and based in Tel Aviv, Zoya Cherkassky is a painter whose work depicts moments of cultural collision in everyday life, drawing from her own memories and those of her friends, family members and ancestors. Spurred by her connection to Tel Aviv’s Nigerian community through her husband, Sunny Nnadi, as well as her sustained curiosity about the immigrant experience, Cherkassky’s latest body of work focuses on the African diaspora in Europe, Israel and the former Soviet Union from the 1930s to the present. “The Arrival of Foreign Professionals” exhibition, now on display at Fort Gansevoort gallery in New York, is named after a painting by Cherkassky’s great-great-uncle Abram Cherkassy, which she encountered while visiting the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv a few weeks before the Russian invasion. Cherkassky’s bold brushwork adds a sense of movement and gravitas to her scenes of everyday life, as in “Hard Day’s Night” (2023). Through careful curation of detail — a TV screen showing a soccer game, smoke emerging from a factory out the window — Cherkassky places her vibrant depictions of social life within a larger historical framework. In “Party at the Dorms” (2022), Cherkassky drew from her sister’s memories to depict a 1980s party. Describing how Russian women would sometimes awkwardly adopt American fashions during this time period, she points to the woman in the picture wearing a cheetah-print dress and blue leggings. “Cultural clash,” Cherkassky says, smiling. “The Arrival of Foreign Professionals” is on view through June 3, 2023, fortgansevoort.com.
Covet This
A Fantastical Array of Objects From Dolce & Gabbana Casa
At this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, Dolce & Gabbana Casa is unveiling the fruits of a new initiative called Gen D, in which the brand invited 10 artists and designers to create pieces in collaboration with traditional Italian craftsmen, fostering a dialogue between the fashion house’s Sicilian iconography and the artists’ global influences. The London-based designer Rio Kobayashi said the idea of a cross-cultural conversation particularly inspired him given his Japanese Italian heritage. The subject of mixed identities got him thinking about zebras, which led him to name a dresser in the collection Shima Uma, the Japanese term for the animal. High-contrast marquetry made by an artisanal woodworker near Lake Como gives the dresser its striped appearance. For his chandelier, the artist Chris Wolston homed in on the similarities between the vegetation in Sicily and Medellín, Colombia. On a hike one day just outside of Medellín, he encountered a growth of Pitahaya vines, whose night-blooming flowers gave name to his piece Flor de Una Noche (“Flower of One Night”). The Pitahaya’s cascading forms reminded him of Sicilian cactuses, as well as the arms of Murano chandeliers. Going straight to the source, Wolston worked with a Venetian glassmaker to create glass tendrils that were joined with ceramic flowers made in Sicily. Available on request, dolcegabbana.com.
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