Recently we haven’t had the chance to update you on our work and happenings during Tel Aviv’s first design fair Fresh Design. But here we are, back after a six weeks, and happy to share our curatorial work and product design exhibited at Fresh Design on May 21-25.

We are proud to have been the curators of Fresh Design, visited by 30 000 art and design lovers, and showcased in parallel with the art far Fresh Paint. Although the event recently closed its doors, the buzz is still in the air. For those who missed the occasion we want to share some memories from our point of view.

During three months of work, five days and nights of production, and six days of fair, we had the pleasure to work with more then 100 Israeli designers. We built a completely new platform for Israeli designers, putting up a 1000 square meters tent next to the art fair, and in the Greenhouse, we showcased around 35 young promising designers. It was our first time working on such a huge project.

Here are some images of our late night’s of work, people who worked with us, product design, the location and our special public who came to visit us.

It has been an absolute privilege to work with Fresh Design’s and Fresh Paint’s small team, Art Director and Head Curator Yifat Gurion, and CEO and co-founder Sharon Tillinger.

First days of work

Wooden lamp by Nir Appelbaum

Sculptural rings by Dania Chelminsky

by Galia Tammuz Baladi

Lightning by Hen Bikovski

3D ceremic lab with Studio Under

Jacquared 2.0 from the Design Museum Holon and FabLab Israel

Magenta Studio by Periscope

At the entrance of the tent – Boris Oicherman installation

A day at the Fair – showing ceramic vases by Ayala Sol Friedman

Terra – a collection of stools made from a special composite of compressed dirt and natural fibers by Adital Ela


Tumai Studio by Tomer Reuven

As two curious lovers of Design and Fashion, we always enjoy a little visit to ‘Merci’, a 16,000sf concept store “not like the others”.

Bernard and Marie France Cohen, founders of the children’s fashion label, Bonpoint, opened in 2009 ‘Merci’ in the district of the Marais in Paris; presenting vintage furniture, multiple clothing lines as well as design furniture, a flower shop as well as a restaurant and a coffee shop, where you can peacefully sip your coffee while browse in the library of magazine and art books.

In other words, ‘Merci’ covers all aesthetic grounds.

Additionally from being a concept store, ‘Merci’ always features outside projects, keeps up with interesting Design exhibition, and collaborates with inspiring people in the industry.
We always take pleasure in those stores who takes an artistic approach to design their stores and make sure to keep it interesting by changing their display on a regular basis, which makes us always keen to come back.
Aside from the pleasure and variety of beautiful things, ‘Merci’ is also the first ” charity store” in France; its proceeds go to the ‘Endowment Fund’ a charity association funding educational projects in Madagascar.

All in all, we wanted to share with you the good news, ‘Merci’ has finally opened an Online store. So all Telavivan’s can now purchase design products, interior decoration and fashion clothing lines that we could previously enjoy only on a trip to Paris.

http://www.merci-merci.com/en/












The Fiat 500 is Merci’s Mascot (and logo), dressed with tons of stuff on top. The Mascot’s attire usually changes depending on the season, theme, and trend.

Working on the Greenhouse of Fresh Design, we heard about this new designer and had the pleasure in meeting with him last saturday at his new exhibition at Periscope Gallery. Something that always challenges us, in design, is design art, where the products are not necessarily functional but beautiful to look at.

Moshe Roas, a graduate of Textile Design Department at Shenkar College, creates his work from layers of etchings and burns in fabric and metal that begin from different stages of annihilation and disintegration. His first solo exhibition examines textiles as a space of time and memory, attached to the human body, history, and culture.

Periscope Gallery is one of the first design galleries in Israel, founded and owned by Sary Paran in 1997, as a non-profit association for the purpose of showing contemporary Israeli design. The gallery has made a point of broadening the term “design” by stretching its’ boundaries, holding conceptual and experimental exhibitions, and providing platforms for different aspects of design.

Curator Irena Gordon. Periscope gallery, 176 Ben Yehuda Street, Tel Aviv

Exhibition view

“Roas’ gentle, live drawing is born into the bedding and evolves away from inside, as a force working with the unraveling of the material.

The drawing reacts to the occurrences and continues them, both present and merging. It unstitches and weaves as it passes from the fabric to the wall, to the metal and back to the wall. Sometimes Roas recaptures the drawing inside an asphalt covered metal board. He draws and opens curving paths, and then etches the board and leaves it thus, without cleaning the asphalt and passing the image from the board to the paper using a printing press, as is common in the etching technique. Thus, the metal plate is left in its blackness and darkness, like a black mirror, reflecting the wild, mysterious forces working in culture.

The spectator, trapped inside the fictional space Roas weaves, finds himself flung between flashes of memory and its insistent erasure, between a corporal and substantial presence of time, and its uninhibited evaporation. The artist undoes the material, and drops the mutually possessed body and consciousness into a carousel of beauty and destruction.”

Heat pressing and welding on sponge, 64 x 94.

“Roas challenges the appearance of things, and penetrates into their hidden layers, be they fabric metal or sponge. he breaks their completeness, exposes their boundaries, peels their surface. This undoing allows him to invent the stories of imagined culture and history.”

The 52nd edition of Salone Internazionale del Mobile 2013 is officially over in three days and no (!) we won’t be coming back from Milano. It seems that this year we had better things to do with Design in Tel Aviv.

It’s been a long time since we want to share the upcoming project we are working on, and now we can! Fresh Paint will hold its first design fair – Fresh Design, alongside the art fair – Fresh Paint 6 and will present selected projects by Israeli designers, galleries, leading brands and design shops.

Constantly on the move and on the lookout for the best new creations, we thought we should share the best of design we saw as well as promising Israeli designers present in Milan this year. Enjoy!

‘Mirage’ by Tokujin Yoshioka for Italian company Lema.

A shimmering collage of mirrored plates designed by renowned Japanese designer, Tokujin Yoshioka. Lined side by side, each panel is able to be manipulated and arranged at various positions and angles. It is a contemporary reinterpretation of traditional mirror manufacturing, merging the disciplines of art and design in one cohesive piece.

Israeli designer  Nir Meiri will be exhibiting at Spazio Rossana Orlandi. He will be part of Fresh Design as well  in Tel Aviv.

Marine light  is inspired by the sea.
Through the unconventional use of seaweed as a main material for a domestic environment, the product plays on the tension between the artistic and the commercial.
Ancient cultures have appreciated and utilized seaweeds for different uses. Today, seaweeds are cultivated and harvested on a commercial scale, as a result of a growing interest driven by environmental concerns.

Top-heavy chairs by Swedish studio, Claesson Koivisto Rune, are currently on show at Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile.

Israeli designer Itay Ohaly will be represented at Spazio Rossana Orlandi too with his new collection Unpacking. We are glad to share that the winner of the 2013 Frame Moooi Award  is The Impulsive furnishing Unit we shared here by Christian Fiebig (Germany), Itay Ohaly (Israel) and Thomas Vailly (France). Itay will be part of the greenhouse at Fresh Design in Tel Aviv.

Product Launch – Bojka at Rossana Orlandi.

The design studio Bojka, based in Beirut, creates furniture and artistic installations using a variety of vintage and contemporary fabrics.  It is part of a new collection entitled Migration at Spazio Rossana Orlandi at the Milan Design Week 2013.

Terra bio furniture from earth and organic waste by the Israeli designer, Adital Ela.

Made from earth and natural fibers, ‘Terra‘ by Tel-Aviv-based designer, Adital Ela, is a series of 100% organic products and furniture.  The objects can be produced anywhere with local earth and agricultural residue, requiring zero energy, creating no pollution, and are fully renewable and compostable.

This collection will be presented at the fair Fresh Design in Israel in May.

stools with production ingredients

Adital Ela will be exhibiting this collection at the Fresh Design fair in Tel Aviv (21-25 May 2013).

Many readers will no doubt be familiar with the work of Arik and his bold design pieces. Most of you should remember his showroom, but not for long. Each week, the layout changes according to new objects created or collected from here and abroad, magazines up to date, or the last book or page seen by Arik or his team.

As a designer, Arik Ben Simhon has never lost that dreamy quality, he loves the way it’s possible to experience his showroom through its objects and artifacts. His studio sits on Nahalat Binyamin street, in Florentine and presents two floors of design just for us.

For the furnishing of the ‘C-Fabriek’ exhibition at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven (Netherlands) Christian Fiebig (Germany), Itay Ohaly (Israel) and Thomas Vailly (France), developed a new series of furniture with a new production unit. With the production unit a whole furniture factory is reduced to the size of a standardized plywood palette, which can be shipped and produce anywhere.  The designers used a CNC machine on a plywood pallet to produce a range of bright furniture that can be flat packed and easily assembled.

We met Itay Ohaly in Israel and exhibited his work at the gallery. He finished his master program at the Design Academy Eindhoven and since then, he says, he is a happy designer. His projects assimilate a diverse palette of materiality, technique, craftsmanship and language that we love.

With 861 submissions from 71 countries, we are glad to share this project is one of the nine finalists of the Frame Moooi Award 2013, honoring the world’s best contextual product design. The Award Ceremony will take place on 10 April during the Salone del Mobile in Milan.

Freshly graduated from the Textile Design Department of the Royal Academy of Arts (in the Hague) in 2012, the talented Wies Preijde took our breath away. She derives her inspiration from rhythmic patterns, textures, shapes encountered in everyday life or from architecture. She then links these to the techniques used to make the textiles.

The installation called Tegendraads consists of various hand-woven walls, which together, affects our perspectives in space. A combination of lines, colors, views and passageways gives the observer the idea of walking through a transparent home.

Very often when we meet talented textile designers in Israel, we always wonder how they can express themselves in the industrial design industry without loosing their main interest and creativity.

Wies created this imaginary environments and passages, proving that textile can be a wall, a window, a door – or anything you just have in mind.

Book design by Niels Berk for Wies.

“The textile walls make the existing space divisible, but also create optical transparency and spaciousness by the experience in perspective.” Wies says, “Through a combination of lines, color, views and passageways the spectator the idea of a transparent walking home.”

To get an idea of how Ronen Bavli approaches design, look no further than one of the walls of his studio paneled with all kind of material experimentation and patterns; what you see piled atop the shelves and pinned around is the product of the minds working around there.

When Ronen founded Magenta eleven years ago, it was as a gallery store at Emek Refaim St. in Jerusalem and offered a variety of items and works by Artists and Designers.

Last Friday, armed with our camera we visited the Moshav Aminadav on top of the hill (we can’t really remember how we found our way there – but it seemed close to Jerusalem) and met Ronen in his studio.

Taking sneak peeks, the workshop is more like a complex, consisting on 2 or 3 buildings connected with the purpose to design and produce one of a kind items and items produced in small series. Over the years, the studio has increased in size and production and became a design and manufacturing office with an adjacent workshop.

Magenta is exhibiting for the first time at Periscope Gallery in Ben Yehuda 176, the exhibition is called The Autonomists and was curated by Studio BET.

Lunch break for everybody around this table. About 20 people currently work and create in the studio, including product designers, graphic designers and craftsman of all sorts.

Who: Shlomit Bauman

What: Israeli Ceramic designer, video art, mural design. Her work has been selected in few museum collections.
Teacher at Parsons, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Technion, Hit Holon Institure and curator.
Prizes: Professional and public activities as a manager of the ceramic artsits association of Israel, trustee of Benyamini contemporary ceramic center.

Bauman turned a variety of everyday objects into moulds.
“The broken appearance is a result of the different shrinkage characteristics of the materials,” she explained. “But for me, it symbolises the distortion of the process of trying to mix two different cultures together.” Bauman is working on her solo exhibition currently, we’ll keep you informed.

This body of work is made from S5 (an extinct kind of Israeli local clay) with Porcelain (the trendy, noble and global kind of clay).

The sand chair; material: mortar, sand, styrofoam and pigments.

The young Swiss-born partnership Kueng Caputo has worked together since they were both students of design at the HGKZ Zurich from 2004 to 2008. Sarah Kueng and Lovis Caputo practice design as response with an emphasis on understatement and improvisation.

These chairs are made by a pigment colored mixture of sand and mortel. Layer by layer is poured in a casting mold. Then the massive object is worked to a stool by hammer and chisel. Every stool is a unique piece.

Photo by Linda Suter & Paola Caputo.