Photography: Anna Knott
 

If you follow modern art, you probably read the website Contemporary Art Daily. Founded by the precocious Forrest Nash, a native of Richmond, Virginia, five years ago as he was finishing his fine arts degree at the School of the Art Institute, the site now gets 1.25 million hits a month.

Each day, the 25-year-old introduces visitors to one new artist currently exhibiting somewhere in the world—an artist he cherry-picks from among the hundreds of people he gets pitched every week from under-the-radar galleries and big museums alike. “We try to strike a balance between promoting important shows and representing the diversity of what is going on in contemporary art,” he says.

This selective approach (as well as his site’s spare design) is mirrored in Nash’s minimalist South Loop apartment. To see the bare essentials that fulfill his aesthetic needs, see below.

10 Things He Loves

FRESH ORCHIDS ($19 to $25 a stem, A New Leaf, 312 S. Dearborn St.)
“I like flowers that are unusual without being fussy.”

COMME DES GARÇONS 2 MAN COLOGNE ($120, Barneys, 15 E. Oak St.)
“The bottle itself looks like art.”

JANE COOPERMAN VELVET QUILT ($1,000, by special order, jcooperman6@hotmail.com)
“Its intensity stands out because everything else in my apartment is so stripped-down.”

BREVILLE ONE-TOUCH TEA MAKER ($249, Williams-Sonoma, 4999 Old Orchard Center, Skokie)
“The form is nothing special, but it makes the exact, canonical version of any given kind of tea—and I love tea.”

PAINTING BY THOMAS JULIER
“This abstraction of a soccer ball is by an of-the-moment Swiss artist. I like how it floats on the wall.”

CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ BY FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES ($554, amazon.com)
“This gorgeous two-volume set shows the complete sum of this artist’s public life.”

UNIQLO +J MILITARY JACKET ($50 for similar styles, uniqlo.com)
“Designed by Jil Sander, this works as a spring jacket but also as a winter layer.”

PAINTING BY GAYLEN GERBER (Gerber is represented by Wallspace gallery in New York)
“This is one of my favorite pieces. It’s from a key moment in Gerber’s career, when he applied a layer of gray to a finished work by another artist.”

CASE STUDY DAYBED ($1,698, Design Within Reach, 10 E. Ohio St.)
“Its simple lines make it blend perfectly with the architecture of my space.”

UNCUT TOPAZ
“I found this stone when I was a little kid. I get pleasure from holding and looking at it.”