Design Miami 2019 – This Year’s Winner of the Curio Booth ⇒ Espasso by Claudia Moreira Salles just won the Best Curio booth at Design Miami/ 2019! Espasso presents limited-edition lamp collection called Fine Tuning, combining an exotic reclaimed woods abundant in rich grains and colours – such as rosewood and pine – with niobium, a rare metal that transforms chromatically without any added pigments. Niobium is commonly used in the tech industry, but Salles turns the material into art rather than a scientific matter.
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Espasso, presented “Fine Tuning” by Claudia Moreira Salles: The limited-edition lighting collection Fine Tuning by Claudia Moreira Salles combines exotic reclaimed woods rich in grain and colour, such as rosewood (jacarandá) and pine (pinho de Riga), with Niobium (Nb), a rare element, in its purest state. The Niobium is transformed chromatically through electrolytic anodization, without added pigmentation. While the material is often used in the tech industry, Moreira Salles introduced this unconventional application as an element of design rather than science.
Fine Tuning reveals recurring motifs in Moreira Salles’s work, addressing principles of contrast and harmony. A distinction in lightness and weight is found by contrasting the density of the lamp bases with light and airy shades and the opaque tonality of the wood with the iridescence of Niobium. Additionally, each piece is a unique combination of reclaimed and rare materials.
Recognized among Brazil’s top contemporary designers, Moreira Salles creates pieces with clean geometry, harmoniously pairing Brazilian hardwoods with contrasting materials such as concrete, stone, and metal. Fine Tuning was originally launched at ESPASSO in New York in 2016 and will feature a new piece added to the collection exclusively for Design Miami/.
Curio is Design Miami’s exhibition platform which invites designers, curators, innovators and gallerists to present cabinets of curiosity throughout the fair. The program spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and emphasizes surprising installations of scientific and technological research alongside handcraft and creative production. The Curios are interspersed amongst Design Miami’s core galleries, infusing the fair’s exhibition program with inventive snapshots of today’s design landscape.
Claudia Moreira Salles is a Brazilian interior designer from Rio de Janeiro. After working at the Design Institute of Rio’s Museum of Modern Art, in a furniture project for public schools, the designers started doing craftworks, especially in wood. Claudia participated in several groups such as Bienal Brasileira of design (Belo Horizonte), Galeria Espasso in New York and Sintonia Final in Rio de Janeiro.
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