It was Valentine’s Day 1998 when Kim Hostler and Juliet Burrows fell in love—with a house. The Manhattan-based couple, founders of Hostler Burrows gallery, had been looking for a place in upstate New York when, on that fateful snowy afternoon, their intrepid real estate agent led them down a dirt road. “It looked like a Swedish country home,” Burrows recalls of the cabin, hand-built by its previous owners and covered at the time in red clapboard. Its vernacular instantly appealed to the couple, given their then newly opened gallery’s speciality in Scandinavian antiques. “I call it our little handmade house,” says Hostler, still crazy about its pine-clad living room and fireplace of hewn local stone.

On Tuesday, Design Miami made an auspicious debut, not only owing to its ne-plus-ultra roster—many of the galleries showing in their hometown—but also to its extraordinary venue: the Hôtel de Maisons, an 18th-century mansion near the Musée d’Orsay that Karl Lagerfeld called home for roughly two decades (last month, it drew attention as the location for the Marni show).

Jakob Jørgensen was born in 1977 in Nyborg, Denmark. As his interest in large scale steel sculpture developed, he submitted a proposal to the Danish National Workshop in 2017, and was granted access to their vast metalworking facilities. He continued his exploration of the medium, building a dedicated studio tailored to working with steel pipe on the island of Bornholm in 2020. Jørgensen’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions including at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Designmuseum, Copenhagen, Denmark; and the 21st Century Museum, Kanazawa, Japan. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the Finn Juhl Prize, the Bodum Design Award, and the IFDA Goldleaf Award.

From his workshop on a remote island in the Baltic Sea, the artist crafts extraordinary totems using industrial pipes. 

For the past two years, a dazzling type of alchemy has been taking place on the remote Danish island of Bornholm, a Baltic Sea stronghold that’s geographically closer to Poland and Sweden than Denmark. There, amid the rugged sylvan landscape, one of the country’s leading creatives, Jakob Jørgensen, has conjured a veritable forest of captivating totems by welding and further manipulating low-carbon steel pipes. Taking inspiration from the wooded island’s abundance of trees, the monumental works resulting from this painstaking process have now gone on view at HB381, the contemporary art gallery founded by Juliet Burrows and Kim Hostler in Tribeca.

With his first solo exhibition within the United States just around the corner, Jakob Jørgensen’s sculptural works have grown – both in scale and ambition. These latest works mark his individual practices transition from a design led studio to one that is exploring materiality and the purely sculptural. What remains from his first tubular steel piece back in 2017 through to this latest collection is Jørgensen’s inquisitive nature towards his chosen medium – heating, pushing, expanding, compressing and deforming the humble steel tube in order to create new expressions.