ETAI x Felipe Pantone team up for the first time

This summer, albertz benda ignites a dynamic new dialogue at its Los Angeles gallery with Parallel Practices: Tailored Structures & Kinetic Surfaces, a landmark exhibition uniting Felipe Pantone and ETAI for the very first time. Opening July 17 and on view through August 8, 2026, the presentation will transform the gallery into a site of vibrant and unexpected harmony.

Parallel Practices: Tailored Structures & Kinetic Surfaces is a dynamic and highly anticipated exhibition uniting Felipe Pantone, internationally recognized for his groundbreaking explorations of color, movement, and visual systems, with ETAI, a rising and highly sought-after voice whose practice operates at the intersection of fashion and design. Set within the domestic architecture of albertz benda Los Angeles, the exhibition brings together Pantone’s wall-based artworks and a series of collaborative design pieces presented throughout the gallery, housed in a mid-century modern home. Through their distinct yet converging practices, the artists’ questions of use, intimacy, and lived experience, positioning each work as part of an interconnected artistic system rather than a singular object.

While rooted in different disciplines, both artists share a commitment to craft, precision, and the productive use of tradition as a working tool rather than a constraint. Rather than approaching collaboration as a stylistic fusion, Pantone and Etai engage in a process of structural dialogue, one that preserves the authorship and methodologies of each practice while allowing for moments of friction, overlap, and translation.

The exhibition debuts a new body of collaborative design pieces developed by ETAI and Pantone. Beginning with mid-century furniture sourced across Los Angeles, ETAI digitally maps and reworks each object as the basis for transformation. Pantone designs custom fabric elements, produced by the Italian textile house Limonta, which are incorporated through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction. The collaborative works emerge through a negotiated balance where systems of design, image-making, and material production are continually tested and recalibrated. The resulting works integrate contemporary imagery with classic design structures, reimagining each object while preserving its original logic.

Alongside the reimagined design objects, Pantone’s wall-based kinetic works function as both visual anchors and conceptual accelerators within the exhibition. Their optical effects, driven by rhythm, repetition, and velocity, echo broader systems of data flow, digital circulation, and contemporary visual consumption. Their chromatic structures and surface effects establish a visual language that is carried into the printed fabrics used throughout the exhibition.

Presented in close dialogue, Pantone’s artworks and the collaborative design pieces form a unified environment across the gallery. Furniture and wall-based works are arranged as an interconnected system rather than as discrete elements, emphasizing continuity, exchange, and visual coherence across media.

Through a sustained exchange between disciplines, Parallel Practices: Tailored Structures & Kinetic Surfaces reframes collaboration as a generative force that expands the possibilities of both art and design.

ABOUT ETAI LA:

Founded in 2023 by Etai Drori, Etai LA stands as a paragon of luxury, a brand that defines itself by the silent language of sophistication and the art of understated elegance. Under the deft hands of Etai Drori, the "king of luxury customs," this label has become the benchmark for those with an eye for the exceptional, a brand where exclusivity and personal expression find their sartorial match. Here, premium materials are transformed through meticulous craftsmanship into garments that speak to the connoisseur without uttering a single word.

Crafted amid the creative pulse of Los Angeles, Etai LA is a brand born from a legacy of deconstructing luxury only to reconstruct it into something even more formidable. It's a realm where Japanese denim becomes a canvas and Mongolian cashmere a medium, each fabric chosen not only for its inherent quality but for its ability to convey the silent strength and resilience of its wearer.

ABOUT FELIPE PANTONE:

Felipe Pantone [b. 1986, Buenos Aires, Argentina] lives and works in Valencia, Spain. Beginning his career as a graffiti artist at the age of twelve, he went on to receive a degree in Fine Art from the University in Valencia. Recent exhibitions include Movimento e Transformacão no Tecnoceno, Galeria Raquel Arnaud, São Paulo (2025); Studio Archive, Casa Axis, Valencia (2024); Prospectiva, CCCC (Centre del Carmen), Valencia(2023); Felipe Pantone: Metallic Contact, albertz benda, NY (2022). For Pantone, his art is a meditation on the ways we consume visual information. Drawing inspiration from kinetic artists like Victor Vasarely and Carlos Cruz-Diez - who both utilized the moiré effect (in which lines of contrasting color give the impression of movement) - his contemporary work produces the sensation of vibration as the viewer’s position changes in relation to the work. To achieve the desired effect, Pantone utilizes modeling software, which allows for 3D insights into a project, which then can be translated into frescoes, murals, paintings, and sculptures, which give tactile merit to what is occurring in the digital world.

ABOUT ALBERTZ BENDA:

Founded in 2015, albertz benda is a contemporary art gallery with an international program exploring material and textility as well as cultural and social dialogues. Our Chelsea space is host to rotating exhibitions with an emphasis on solo presentations of emerging artists, new research into historic figures, and thematic group exhibitions. In 2021, the gallery expanded to a second location in Los Angeles. Featuring an evolving identity separate from our New York program, the LA space is realized within the context of a domestic setting, advancing new connections between visual arts, craft, and design.