Most filmmakers have ruined the true appeal of attending an art opening in New York. Thankfully, though, they have not yet destroyed the joy of going to a design exhibition. Exhibitions are a different sort of affair, featuring fashionable people who smile, bright design talent, and the priceless reassurance that you are discovering stellar work before your competitive friends.
Last night, Objects of Common Interest debuted its first solo exhibition, New Reflections, at Matter, the city’s influential design gallery and creative basecamp for new work. While cofounders Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis have earned high marks within the industry for their sleek and restrained style, the design public is less familiar. The duo splits their time between New York and Greece, running their studio LOT Architecture and pondering the beauty of mathematics. If Euclidean geometry wasn’t your thing in high school, Objects of Common Interest has done the hard work for you, turning out a collection that translates all the planes and axioms into appealing, tangible constructs.
The new Relativity of Color series melds handblown glass and cast acrylic into a tabletop that feels like a lucid choose-your-own-adventure exercise. Twenty interchangeable pieces can be combined to create a vase, plate, wide cup, bowl, and glass (starting at $300). That heavy interest in transparency can also be found on the Plane side table ($4,000), a clean marble creation with a colored acrylic top.
The designers are comfortable merging materials and seem to relish the journey. Their marble mirror ($2,150) pushes the idea of presentation and shape, appearing both round and disc-like. The piece features copper—still the metal of the moment—that is polished to remarkable effect and then nestled into a sliced marble habitat. It’s a piece that looks good from every angle, and likely required extraordinary math skills to get right.
The New Reflections exhibition is on view through December 9.
