Welcome to The Buzz, our monthly roundup of design world news and inspiration for Design Miami’s discerning community of creatives and collectors. Enjoy!

Brit Dyrnes and Irene Nordli at Galerie Format Oslo

Galerie Format Oslo’s concurrent shows, Brit Dyrnes: Terra and Irene Nordli: The Pillars, juxtapose two Norwegian ceramic artists working at the forefront of the field, each in their own way. Based in a village on the northwestern coast, Dyrnes embraces clay in its rawest state, hand sculpting abstracted, earthy forms inspired by the fjords and mountains that surround her. Nordli, in contrast, based in Oslo, riffs on the material culture of porcelain in contemporary and ancient contexts. Her Pillars series uses touristy Greek sculptures and hobby ceramics as molds. Hurry, these shows close next week.

“Drawing on nature for inspiration, Brit Dyrnes unveils the versatility of clay. Irene Nordli’s porcelain work, meanwhile, masterfully balances between the figurative and abstract. Together, they demonstrate the dynamism and experimentation that’s so alive and well in Norway’s contemporary ceramic scene.” —Irija Øwre, Director of Galerie Format Oslo

Conversation Pieces at SFMOMA

On view now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Conversation Pieces: Contemporary Furniture in Dialogue. Organized by SFMOMA curator Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher and LA-based interior architect Alexandra Loew, the show features 45 diverse and intriguing icons of collectible design that, as the curators explain, “prioritize meaning and material choice over function and practicality.” Aside from one 1951 Isamu Noguchi lamp, the checklist covers the postmodern era to the present—from Memphis designers Shiro Kuramata and Nathalie du Pasquier to today’s rising stars like Germane Barnes, Woody De Othello, and Jay Sae Jung Oh. At points throughout the installation, you can listen to interviews with six designers speaking to urgent issues, including sustainability, identity, and history. The show runs through June 25, 2023.

Eny Lee Parker’s Sexy at Objective Gallery

At Objective Gallery in NYC, designer Eny Lee Parker has guest curated Sexy, a group show of objects at the intersection of art and design. Participating talents include Anuar Maauad, Chen Chen & Kai Williams, Chuch Estudio, Dina Nur Satti, Jinyeong Yeon, Minjae Kim, and many more. Featuring colorful, unexpected objects set against deep red walls, Sexy offers a delightful hit of eye candy for an upbeat start to the fall culture season. It’s open through October 7th.

“The goal was to bring together a mix of artists from different industries and backgrounds and give them the freedom to have some fun.” —Eny Lee Parker

Stanislaw Trzebinski at Southern Guild

Opening this week at Southern Guild in Cape Town: Solastalgia, the gallery’s second show for Kenyan-born artist Stanislaw Trzebinski. Encompassing fantastical yet functional furniture and objects primarily cast in bronze, the new collection responds to the looming threat of ecological collapse and imagines creatures of the future born of biological necessity—acid-tolerant amoeba, burrowing cave dwellers, and giant carnivorous mushrooms. On view through November 19th, the work is dark but also humorous, prodding us to find hope and take action now.

“I’ve been experiencing what environmental philosopher and sustainability professor Glenn A. Albrecht calls solastalgia, a nostalgia for the loss of places that used to give me solace… Our very home, the Earth, is being ruined, despoiled. So much is already lost, and I’m homesick in my own home.” —Stanislaw Trzebinski

Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance at Demisch Danant

Opening this week at Demisch Danant in NYC: Made In Situ, the US debut of French designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance. The show presents Duchaufour-Lawrance’s first two collections following his recent move to Lisbon, where he fell in love with the local culture and regional craft traditions. The first collection, Barro Negro, encompasses a series of black ceramics, handcrafted by master ceramicists Xana Monteiro and Carlos Lima using a process that dates back to Neolithic times. The second, Burnt Cork, is made of cork burned by forest fires, resurrected into custom gradient blocks by NF Cork, a family business in the Algarve region. The blocks have been CNC carved into functional yet fluid furniture forms by master technicians at Granorte in the north of Portugal. The show is open through October 8th.

“The designed pieces are the fruits of my adventures, explorations of geological and biological textures, patterns, materials and their related techniques. Above all, my inspiration comes from human knowledge and sensitivity, linking to and embedded in each specific place.” —Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance

Grethe Sørensen at Galerie Maria Wettergren

Opening this week at Galerie Maria Wettergren in Paris: Feelings of Light on a Dark Night in Tokyo, presenting for the first time in France a new body of work from Grethe Sørensen. The show includes a dozen Jacquard-woven tapestries alongside a video installation, all inspired by the Danish artist’s personal experience—both optical and emotional—with lightscapes in Tokyo. Using her video shots of the metropolis as a kind of sketch, Sørensen has rendered pixels in textile form. As the gallery explains of the work, “light is modulated into soft, nebulous reliefs through the artist’s virtuoso use of different threads.” The show runs through October 29th.

Return to Downtown: Superhouse X Magen H

Next week at NYC’s Superhouse Vitrine, check out Return to Downtown, an installation co-organized by Superhouse and Magen H Gallery. Shining a spotlight on the late-20th-century American Design Art movement associated with legendary downtown gallery Art et Industrie, the show brings together 12 iconic works—some drawn from Magen H Gallery’s collection, and others from the personal archives of artists represented by Art et Industrie back in the day. On view through October 30th, Return to Downtown pays tribute to the still-underappreciated impact that this historical movement has had on contemporary creative culture.

“Lower Manhattan in the ’70s and ’80s was a crucible of style, color, and form, and of people and ideas: it was alive.” —Rick Kaufman, Cofounder of Art et Industrie

Step by Step at Galerie kreo

Paris’s Galerie kreo continues its tradition of typological exhibitions with Step by Step (question.s d’échelle.s), presenting historical and contemporary ladder designs from the gallery’s stellar roster of talents—including Virgil Abloh, Barber Osgerby, Ronan Bouroullec, Front, Alessandro Mendini, Jasper Morrison, Studio Wieki Somers, and more. As the gallery explains, “In the service of a simple and movable object—made up of vertical mounts and horizontal steps that allow for the act of ascent and descent—each designer proposes a specific ladder, emblematic of their research.” The show’s hyper-focus on a single form honors the designers’ divergent approaches and practices, such that each ladder becomes a kind of portrait of its creator. Step by Step is on view through November 5th.

Mise En Place at Friends Artspace

Friends Artspace in Arlington, Virginia kicks off its second season with Mise En Place, a show celebrating the art of the dinner party. Gallerist Margaret Bakke invited several contemporary makers—including Tadeas Podracky, Hannah Lim, Isabel Rower, and Lane Walkup—to create their own place setting, along with candelabras, stemware, butter dishes, vases, cake stands, and more. “Mise En Place has everything,” Bakke says, “even a punchbowl, for a mythic dinner party.” The show runs through December 20th.