Why Reinaldo Sanguino is in the Design 100

Reinaldo Sanguino trained at art school in Caracas before settling in New York in the early 1990s, where ceramics became his medium after a workshop taught by Peter Voulkos and encouragement from Warren MacKenzie to train at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Each piece begins as a hand-thrown or hand-built form, stool, vessel, sculptural object, that he then glazes and paints in layers shaped as much by mood and surroundings as by the form itself, a technique rooted in his long-standing interest in Meissen porcelain and its history.

That combination of technical control and an artist’s instinct for surface has kept Sanguino on The Future Perfect’s roster since 2003, when David Alhadeff first brought him on, one of the gallery’s longest-standing relationships. Two decades on, his glazed ceramic furniture still reads as sculpture as much as object, carrying the energy of the New York street culture he arrived into alongside the Venezuelan training he brought with him.